You don't. There are something to be said about the Erlang semantics though: It is functional, which removes a lot of mistakes. Unlike other languages, there i

You don't. There are something to be said about the Erlang semantics though: It is functional, which removes a lot of mistakes. Unlike other languages, there is fewer ways to "cheat" and use imperative features. It is a simple, yet powerful language. It got most of the semantics right. And it supports fault tolerance. Fault tolerance means automatic handling of unforseen errors. This is not the same as an exception, mind you. Because you saw that possibility of an error coming from a long distance when you catch an exception. Error handling in Erlang lets you do far more than that. As to getting a faster language, it depends. Erlang is built for low latency over throughput. So it depends on what you value. Do you want better interactivity and low latency, or do you want more throughput in your computation. Do note that most computationally intensive Erlang applications often contains portions of themselves written in other languages, typically C. Or portions implemented in hardware because C is too slow, but I digress :)