Yes, in retrospect using = was probably not a very good choice. I will admit some things in Erlang didn't receive much thought before being added while to some

Yes, in retrospect using = was probably not a very good choice. I will admit some things in Erlang didn't receive much thought before being added while to some things we gave a lot thought; for example the language/systems basic properties and the semantics of concurrency, message passing and error handling.