Erlang will be "particularly bad at things like signal processing"

Question

From the book "Learn you some Erlang for Great Good:"

Erlang is no silver bullet and will be particularly bad at things like image and signal processing, operating system device drivers, and other functions.

Now, operating system device drivers, sure, but is there any reason why Erlang couldn't be used for digital signal procesing? What is the author alluding to here? Is it just that Erlang would display poor performance in a DSP application, or is there a particular reason why it might be structurally unsuited for the job? (I'm not thinking about using it for DSP, I'm just curious.)

Answer 1

Is it just that Erlang would display poor performance in a DSP application

Not just that: you also won't find many (if any) libraries which help you with that, and you may find Erlang's benefits not of much use in these domains. This applies to "number crunching" in general, image and signal processing are just examples.