Erlang binaries on the other hand are awesome, and the use of lists in what Erlang refers to as chardata/iodata is really nice when generating data that will be

Erlang binaries on the other hand are awesome, and the use of lists in what Erlang refers to as chardata/iodata is really nice when generating data that will be written to some kind of output device, since no preprocessing is needed to convert the data to a flat array of bytes. Overall though, yeah, it plays pretty loose with types, though it is generally strict about not using integers where floats are expected and vice versa.