"Here’s the good news for Erlang programmers: Your Erlang program should just run N times faster on an N core processor" isn't dishonest. He's clearly speaking

"Here’s the good news for Erlang programmers: Your Erlang program should just run N times faster on an N core processor" isn't dishonest. He's clearly speaking to Erlang programmers. What would be dishonest would be "here's the good news for C programmers: Your C program should just run N times faster on an N core processor if written in Erlang". To your point though, Erlang gives you scalability. Yeah, on a single core, the C program will be faster. On multiple cores, multiple processors, multiple -machines-, idiomatic Erlang should scale. C code will not. You have to tear it apart, rewrite it, figure out a distribution model, code that or find a good library, fix the bugs in your own code or work around the caveats of that library, etc etc.