It speaks volumes of any kind of technology when you can express novel ideas on top of very simple concepts. Sure, you could do that in any other language, but the fact that it's 5 lines of code eloquently shows what Erlang is optimised _for_. It's the perfect level of abstraction for client/server logic.

Not sure where I'm going with this, I just think there is some kind of mathematical beauty when you can express complex ideas with as few symbols as possible. Writing a Universal Server in Java would be like writing a differential equation using only the four basic mathematical operation. Is that really ideal?