Couldn't you argue that java.util.concurrent.* (and its equivalents in Python and Ruby) already did a lot for concurrency? It isn't Erlang style concurrency (no

Couldn't you argue that java.util.concurrent.* (and its equivalents in Python and Ruby) already did a lot for concurrency? It isn't Erlang style concurrency (not the actor model), but it's a lot more accessible than mutexs, semaphores and condition variables. That being said it would be interesting on what fills Java's niche for Erlang-style concurrency ( there's some fairly interesting work done around Scala's actor model: http://wiki.github.com/jboner/akka http://wiki.github.com/jboner/akka )