I believe the point that oconnore was trying to make is that asking what Erlang offer besides message passing concurrency is like asking what C++ offers beyond RAII and templates. You could add that sort of functionality to C, but it's not going to be as nice as just using C++. A lot of the things which make Erlang ugly are safe guards that prevent the kinds of bugs that allow you to accidentally share state. For instance, if I send a pointer between distributed systems, my program is hosed. Any distributed C++ library is going to either be extremely limited in the kinds of objects it can send or, more likely, just declare via fiat that it's the programmers responsibility not to send anything with a pointer. That's okay until the moment that you import a third party library and you have to go through every object to make sure that it doesn't use a pointer somewhere as a private variable. Meanwhile, with Erlang, there aren't any pointers, so I never even have to think about this stuff.