[chrisseaton]

> almost every program is embarrassingly parallel in Erlang

I can't agree with that, and it's key to my point. There are some problems which we just don't know how to make embarrassingly parallel. Take something classic like mesh triangulation or mesh refinement. Nobody knows how to make those embarrassingly parallel. If you write it in Erlang, it's still not going to be embarrassingly parallel. And it won't scale linearly to N times faster on N cores no matter which language you write it in.

So it's just not true to say that any Erlang program should scale linearly. If nobody on earth knows how to make mesh refinement scale linearly, how will Erlang do it?

Maybe you mean you wouldn't choose to write those programs in Erlang? Well then I think it's a meaningless claim to say Erlang will linearly scale your program, but only if it is a program which is naturally linearly scalable anyway. Erlang hasn't helped you do anything there so why make a claim about it?

[devishard]

"almost every program" != "any program"