Agreed. I'm learning it now, and while there are some new ideas in the concurrency model, it doesn't strike me as hard to learn or use the way (say) Haskell and

Agreed. I'm learning it now, and while there are some new ideas in the concurrency model, it doesn't strike me as hard to learn or use the way (say) Haskell and C++ are. There's a fairly small number of core elements, and the language design as a whole strongly encourages you to make things loudly crash when anything is wrong, rather than passing on corrupt data. That helps immensely with debugging... Also, I found that a lot of concepts from Prolog carry over nicely. Erlang was initially implemented in Prolog, and that's where it gets pattern matching and immutable variables from. (Along with several stylistic / syntactic quirks.)