Yet for some reason, the great majority of the world's network applications do fine without Erlang VM.
[Edit: keep in mind that his application was a poker game server when you re-read that article. "Even" in 2005, the technology to do that was available, without Erlang.]
I have more to say about this but I am afraid I will end up spending the rest of the day proving someone "wrong".
Sure they work without Erlang VM. A lot of them also do fine without UNIX. That doesn't prove anything or anyone wrong or right.
He simply described his experience in writing a highly distributed system and proved it can be robust. He also did write it in 6 weeks, which I think is a big achievement for any (working) distributed system in any language. But saying he was language hopping because he "[didn't] understand Unix systems programming" is a bit silly. If he claims it made the experience better, I don't understand why you imply he doesn't program in a proper Unix way. He used the right tool for the right job.
I agree with you completely; Erlang is indeed the best tool for the job, if you know it well. But my point is that none of the other tools he glossed-over make high-performance server programming impossible; in fact, it's trivial in most of them.
As a matter of fact, Erlang is the only one in that list that has a bondage-and-discipline evaluation model and runtime; all others allow you to interface with native system calls and you will get your requests the instant they arrive and you can process them in $HLL of your choice.
His application domain does not at all suggest a requirement for seamless distribution. A poker server! And if you look closely at the languages of his choice, you see that he didn't have a clear idea; Delphi?
He could have easily "distributed" the application with primitive load balancing. Have a single server handle requests and player signups up to a certain high water mark. I mean, how many players are in a given poker table anyway? Then direct new requests to your standby backup server. Repeat, in round-robin fashion.
By the way, I remember him from comp.lang.lisp; and my memory might have tainted my judgment of the article.
Also, a lot of $HLL programmers have this weird prejudice about C and proper systems programming. They want to do everything in $HLL, down to <insert lowest threshold>. That's silly, C is the native language of most OSes, use it for its power, but only just where necessary.
[Edit: keep in mind that his application was a poker game server when you re-read that article. "Even" in 2005, the technology to do that was available, without Erlang.]
I have more to say about this but I am afraid I will end up spending the rest of the day proving someone "wrong".
http://xkcd.com/386/