Comment by sodapopcan

I don't really have any experience with the JVM other than playing with Clojure. I don't have much to add to the other answers. Two things of note:

- BEAM trades slow CPU in favour of fast IO, so it's not great for number crunching. - While it can be great for CLI utilities, the VM (although very lightweight) does have a noticeable startup time. It's under a second but it's not a good fit for something you would want to run often, ie, if you were building something like git.

As mentioned in other comments, its super power is its concurrency model. I've essentially forgotten what a mutex or semaphore or whatthaveyou is :)