Interesting. I looked through the docs and couldn't find an FAQ or anything that would answer my question of why Spritely decided to develop Goblins. Is there a doc for that? What's its differentiation from something like Erlang, or is it just me missing the point, and comparing apples with bicycles?

We should have a FAQ! We get the Erlang question a lot. In short, Erlang actors are not capabilities because processes can be enumerated in Erlang. Capabilities require that the actors/processes have unforgeable/unguessable private addresses.

I still don't really understand what it's for, despite that it sounds interesting and gets linked here from time to time

but I think the difference is the "distributed" part, where I think they mean distributed over untrusted networks as opposed to distributed over nodes in a private cluster