[jacquesm]

Besides the various mis-interpretations in your comment you are comparing features, but instead you should be comparing systems. Erlang is not a language, it is better thought of as an operating system with a very large amount of work and experience thrown behind two goals: reliability and scalability.

The difference between having such goals stated during the design phase and then keeping sight of them during all future development and say you forcing a thread to crash in the JVM is that in Erlang this is the way to do it, in Java you're going to have to re-implement your supervisor and clean-up yourself. And you'll probably get it subtly wrong.

Erlang is not a bunch of features that you can get elsewhere, it's an integrated whole on a very solid foundation with decades of proof of reliability behind it.