Unicoloured languages are great as long as your code doesn't have to actually do anything (which is lots of modern code, to be fair). Try writing a physics simulator or 3D renderer in Erlang and see how that goes.

Erlang is not great at math performance, also because it uses arbitrary length integers. There is a nice comparison between several languages, including Erlang at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6964392/speed-comparison...

It all depends on how the code is written. Eventually somebody managed to make the Erlang code faster than the baseline C, then someone else made the C version 8k % faster, which proves your point. However, how is that related to using sync/async vs message passing?

> Eventually somebody managed to make the Erlang code faster than the baseline C, then someone else made the C version 8k % faster, which proves your point. However, how is that related to using sync/async vs message passing?

If you want to write high-performance code then you need to be able to write synchronous code and have control over what your yield points are. If you take the "all calls are potentially async, runtime does what it wants" approach (i.e. "no function colouring") then you just will not be able to do that.

> … Erlang … inspired by the message passing semantics of Smalltalk.

What makes you think that?

The Wikipedia entry says Smalltalk was one of it's influences and Joe Armstrong, co-developer of Erlang, mentions message passing as the fundamental aspect of OOP that Erlang gets right.

The Wikipedia "Influenced by Lisp, PLEX,[2] Prolog, Smalltalk" seems to be un-sourced !

> … Joe Armstrong … mentions message passing …

Where?

Here's something Joe Armstrong's PhD thesis does reference in the context of message passing:

"4.5 Programming Notations Based on Message Passing" p33

"Concepts and Notations for Concurrent Programming", Gregory R. Andrews and Fred B. Scheider, Computing Surveys 15(1) March 1983, pp 3 - 43

[pdf] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/fbs/publications/LangSurv.pdf