"high-level" is always a euphemism

This application is not going to be CPU bound, so who cares how slow Erlang is? It'll be IO bound (for which language doesn't matter), and scalability bound (for which Erlang, all else being equal, is going to kick the pants off pretty much any other mature/widely deployed language. It's a sad commentary on the current state of programming languages that every otherwise attractive general purpose language sucks mightily at distributed computing, but there it is).