More basic as in working straight from the Erlang REPl, sure. Web programming is no way to learn a language, if you ask me. But I wouldn't go down much further

More basic as in working straight from the Erlang REPl, sure. Web programming is no way to learn a language, if you ask me. But I wouldn't go down much further in the web stack if you're coming from a PHP background, as it's nice to have something done quickly (And from my limited experiments with Nitrogen, you soon get some pretty neat results).