[rdtsc]

I don't know of another language that put fault tolerance as top item on the design "todo" list. Erlang did that. Processes are lightweight (only a few KB overhead each). Processes have isolated heaps, much like OS processes in fact. That is rather unique. People who have been burned by large concurrent C++ programs crashing with segfaults, dangling pointers and rare race conditions stemming form concurrency units (callback chains, threads) stepping each others' toes, will appreciate that.

Its VM is rather elegant and powerful. It is a marvel of engineering if you wish. O

Even though rather advanced, I would suggest reading blog posts by Jesper Louis Andersen he covers some of these topics at the level I like.

http://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/

The books are also good. There is also Learn You Some Erlang book, I even have the dead tree version of it (but there is a free online version as well). That also touches on some uses.