It does look pretty weird if you have only ever worked in an imperative language. If one can get past the initial impression though, they'll find it's actually

It does look pretty weird if you have only ever worked in an imperative language. If one can get past the initial impression though, they'll find it's actually a very simple, nice language. Much simpler than Scala/C++ and probably even Java these days. Also simpler than other functional languages like Haskell. I picked it up in about 1-2 weeks. There's very few gotchas in the language or hidden complexity. It flows well. I'll also add the language suits the usage pattern. Pattern matching works very well with the gen_server approach. And the binary syntax is so nice if you need to deal with over the wire protocols, as is common in distributed systems.