Erlang co-creators, Joe Armstrong and Robert Virding, have admitted that Erlang was heavily inspired by Java. In an interview at ErlangFactory 2011 SF, they confirmed (in video below) a long standing rumor that Scala Actors had heavily inspired their work in what they then called Erlang Processes. Moreover, they acknowledged the fact that Erlang's VM is barely a clone of the famous Java Virtual Machine.
Joe and Robert then mention design decisions they made and regret choosing dynamic over static typing for Erlang. They confirm that they started the implementation of turning the type system into a static one adding concepts like monads.
Erlang co-creators then promise that these changes will be released soon in a version that also gets rid of the current VM moving back to the well known JVM.
