I tried it for approximately 6 months (a few years ago). I translated some slow python into fairly idiomatic (IMHO) erlang and got some pretty significant speed

I tried it for approximately 6 months (a few years ago). I translated some slow python into fairly idiomatic (IMHO) erlang and got some pretty significant speedups. I had vary little functional programming experience before that, so my comments here come with that caveat. My hangups: - lack of easy-to-use string libraries. far and away the biggest pain point. working in bioinformatics, I deal with a lot of poorly-formatted text. - installing erlang itself was fine, but installing (and finding) any other packages was a PITA. - documentation could have been better. I can't remember what specifically I disliked but remember being frustrated trying to find info about builtin nuances. - syntax. this one seems silly from the outside, but the whole commas-here-but-definitely-not-there and other idiosyncracies really made tweaking code and debugging a pain. Go has similar pains around the "unused variable" errors so I know this type of thing isn't particular to erlang.