The good news about Erlang can be summed up at this: Erlang is the culmination of twenty-five years of correct design decisions in the language and platform. Whenever I've wondered about how something in Erlang works, I have never been disappointed in the answer. I almost always leave with the impression that the designers did the “right thing”. I suppose this is in contrast to Java, which does the pedantic thing, Perl, which does the kludgy thing, Ruby, which has two independent implementations of the wrong thing, and C, which doesn't do anything.