The Erlang VM lets you move actors from your local computer to a different cluster transparently for the caller.<p>The author seems to be thinking it can be transparent at the method call site, but it’s not really the case: when executed locally, pure functions are guaranteed to return (unless hardware limitations), while remote execution necessarily brings the network issues with it; pure functions could now fail for network reasons, but only when running elsewhere.<p>Erlang works around this by forcing you to think of calls to actors as messages and to deal with all the network issues that come with it: works both locally and non locally.