From a "system engineering"(not to be confused with software engineering) perspective they seem quite similar, in my view even something like a watchdog timer(which just about every CPU/core has these days) is just a hardware version of similar philosophies. This[1] is one of my favorite overviews on Erlang and what drives some of those design decisions. You can absolutely apply the same systematic thinking to other domains/places without having to bring OTP or even Erlang into the conversation.