I guess I don't care about a bulletproof VM because I've not had issues with the JVM, CLR or other systems. And BEAM reeks of instability.
Furthermore the resulting apps seem to bear no relation to Erlang's robustness. Look at RabbitMQ. Lots of stability problems... So what's Erlang saving us from?
Sorry, but that disqualifies most programming languages out there. It's not as concise as ML, but it's far more so than your average ALGOL dialect.
(Also, ML isn't as concise as Scheme.)
And BEAM reeks of instability.
[citation needed]
Furthermore the resulting apps seem to bear no relation to Erlang's robustness. Look at RabbitMQ. Lots of stability problems... So what's Erlang saving us from?
A sample size of 1, particularly one that's already known to be an infamous exception (RabbitMQ), isn't helping your case.
Erlang is not deisgned to be nice, elegant or have any other property people normally advertise their language as having. Erlang is designed so that programmers at Ericsson could write better code for phone switches, with constant feedback from said programmers. That's Erlang's mission statement, originally.
If you want concise actors, Scala with Akka allows you to write pretty unreadable code if you want to.
1: https://github.com/rustcc/coroutine-rs 2: https://github.com/zonyitoo/simplesched 3: https://github.com/dpc/mioco 4: https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/c76720d67c0d04f6d77c138c...
