I've talked with Robert at some length and listened to his talk on LFE, and that's more or less the way of it, plus Robert himself was an old Lisp buff from way

I've talked with Robert at some length and listened to his talk on LFE, and that's more or less the way of it, plus Robert himself was an old Lisp buff from way back (hence Lisp-flavored Erlang). It was basically a combination of "this is what we need to do what we want" and occasionally bits of "well of course you do it that way". That was actually how he described tail call elimination in his LFE talk: "of course you have TCE/O, why the hell wouldn't you?" Which was a refreshing perspective to me, considering how many programmers still seem to have been heavily indoctrinated to the idea that recursion is automatically bad.