Not disagreeing with you, but it's worth noting that tuples support random O(n) access by index. They can therefore be used in place of arrays for some simple applications.
There is also some hope that future versions
of the Erlang compiler will allow mutable O(1)
update of tuple elements through setelement
(code inside a process is - almost - guaranteed
not to have shared references).
Safe destructive update of tuples has been implemented
in the compiler and runtime system. This allows the VM to
update tuples in-place when it is safe to do so, thus
improving performance by doing less copying but also by
producing less garbage.
