I don't think Gosling, Stallman or Armstrong ever mentioned any basis in genetic science to justify their language. And seriously, think about it... It's completely absurd.
I'm also not sure why you think that returning error codes is "too good for mediocrity to grasp", because in the 21st century, it's considered a very bad practice that leads to extremely unsafe coding practices, which is one of the many reasons why it's been deprecated in most modern languages invented in this century (except Go ;-)).
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/readings/ro...
As for protocols, there is, for some obvious reasons, still nothing better than asynchronous, out of order message-passing over a packet-based networks, with fixed-size header (upon which one could patter-match in a single pass) and adjustable size payloads, which could adapt to a physical channel by adjusting to its frame-size, so, the stdlib and OTP is good-enough and well-balanced and just works.
It is also not a coincidence that Erlang is pure-functional - so is the world of proteins and enzimes.
There is a bit more universality in a chunked linear structures and stateless asynchronous message passing of type-tagged binary data with feed-back loops co-regulation that it seems.)
Source?
> It is also not a coincidence that Erlang is pure-functional - so is the world of proteins and enzimes.
That world is mostly driven by mutations, which are the exact opposite of functional purity.
I really have no idea where you get all these broken metaphors.
Some sources and excellent documentation are on the bitkeeper.
There is also the MIT Scheme, as seen on TV in the Wizards Lectures (1986 Abelson & Sussman SICP lectures).
BTW, the guys who designed and developed early lisps, up to 80s, were bright people heavily influenced by discoveries of "modern science" of the time, which were genome and protein structures, basics of cell biology, signaling pathways, early genome sequencing techniques etc. Their designs has been based on right principles. Erlang is another example.
Another obviously successful project is called (surprise, surprise!) GNU Emacs. Non surprisingly it is a continuum of early emacses, such as Zmacs.
Recently, Eitaro Fukamachi (a true hero, in my opinion) have bootstrapped a few remarkable projects, which should mark the beginning of the Common Lisp renaissance, but these projects also went unnoticed by packers. Why Clack when we have PHP or Java Server Faces?
As for Erlang syntax - the pattern-matching on receive with variable binding for simple, terms-based protocols is, again, too good for mediocrity to grasp
etc.