Maybe you’re thinking about what Alan Kay said: Dr. Alan Kay on the Meaning of "Object-Oriented Programming"
Specifically:
I thought of objects being like biological cells and/or individual
computers on a network, only able to communicate with messages (so
messaging came at the very beginning – it took a while to see how to
do messaging in a programming language efficiently enough to be
useful).
Since Erlang uses messaging to communicate between processes, this seems like a very apt description of the language.
