Their claim is: Erlang is good for building scalable distributed systems. Scala has actors too, but Erlang is more than actors (a lot more!). It's a language created to build distributed systems and highly scalable servers.
On the other hand, Scala is good for data crunching and mutable/immutable data processing. And you'd have a hard time dealing with mutable data on Erlang. As they are building a highly scalable data analytics system, it makes a lot of sense to couple the two languages. But I guess Akka is good enough to the other 98% of the use cases you may ever find. ;)
Disclaimer: in spite of thinking that Akka is a very cool framework, I think it can quickly become something like Spring, that is, a humongous framework that tries to solve everybody's problems.
Can anyone expand on the "complementary set of features"? One of the biggest selling points for Scala is Akka, which is basically trying to implement Erlang (as I see it). I'm not very experienced with Erlang, so what's missing from Akka?
Perhaps by complementary he means:
- Scala allows you to break away from the share-nothing, strictly immutable constraints of Erlang when you really need to do that for performance.
- Erlang has OTP, Scala has access to the full ecosystem of Java libraries.
On the other hand, Scala is good for data crunching and mutable/immutable data processing. And you'd have a hard time dealing with mutable data on Erlang. As they are building a highly scalable data analytics system, it makes a lot of sense to couple the two languages. But I guess Akka is good enough to the other 98% of the use cases you may ever find. ;)