[StreamBright]

You can answer this from many angle:

- Clojure vs LFE

- JVM vs BEAM

- Lisp-1 vs Lisp-2

Etc, if you are interested only in the syntax differences, there is not much difference there (there are obviously some though!). I think generally speaking Erlang has fewer libraries than Java so that is a big difference in my opinion.

[rvirding]

One major difference between the JVM and the BEAM is the type of application they target. The BEAM is designed to implement Erlang so it supports everything necessary to run Erlang at the base level. It is concurrency, fault tolerance and scalability from the very bottom all the way to the top.