[bcrosby95]

> This way a single 'program' can have many things going on at once and it is never blocking. From the programmer's perspective it feels like you are writing synchronous code but you are getting async behaviour 'for free'.

I wish people would stop saying this. Writing concurrent systems in BEAM requires thought if you want to avoid deadlocks, races, bottlenecks, and performance problems. It also can be a bit tricky because processes serve many roles at once: fault isolation, GC isolation, the unit of concurrency, and the unit of synchronization.

Yes, a process can unleash concurrency and parallelization. But you also use processes to do things synchronously since a process goes through its mailbox one message at a time. You can accidentally bottleneck your system because of this.

Regardless, it does make it easier to write certain types of programs.