Actually, Armstrong was talking about text handling, which is not the same thing - certainly not in the context of a thread about writing an editor (in Erlang).

Actually, Armstrong was talking about text handling, which is not the same thing - certainly not in the context of a thread about writing an editor (in Erlang). I'm by no means an Erlang expert, nor have I ever written an editor; but I don't think it self-evident that, say, language support for regular expressions is a significant aid. (Automatic memory management may be helpful, but Erlang has that and it's not what we're talking about anyway.)