I'm another recent Erlang convert (though I'm still trying to get used to the paradigm and ecosystem). There are a few concepts that haven't quite clicked for me.

I come from a Rails background. While Erlang's hot code reloading and the ability to attach to running nodes is cool, I am not quite able to connect the dots on how this is useful. In Rails, a process is short-lived by design (the lifecycle of a request). Attaching to a process is useless, but the Rails console essentially gives you an isolated process to inspect production code and data. I don't see how extending that to an existing process would be useful.

So, challenging my assumptions, perhaps short-lived processes aren't the best approach for a web service. Perhaps that's the paradigm in Rails because Ruby lacks the tooling to make a long-lived process easy to maintain. If a long-lived process is as easy to maintain as short-lived processes, then suddenly new architectures open up. How are these architectures different? What are the benefits? What are some examples?