[e_proxus]

1. My point still stands, using if-statements is not common in Erlang exactly for the reason you mention.

2. In Erlang it usually only make sense to care about errors which you can actually handle in a sensible way. Everything else you usually "let crash" and let the supervisor tree deal with recovering. Defensive programming is another anti-pattern in Erlang in my opinion.

4. Not sure what you mean with "not great". With Erlang, if you have a completely parallelizable problem you should see close to linear scalability. If it drops of after that it's either because the problem is not parallelizable enough or because of your architecture.

Yeah, I'm not arguing Erlang over Java either. I'm just pointing out that blanket statements like this are usually because of architecture or design rather than shortcomings of the language itself.