Learning erlang here. I wish I had seen this article before -- I haven't even finished reading it yet and it's already nicely explained some things that confused me for a while before.

For instance, the idea that IO doesn't necessarily go to the node the process is running on. That makes a lot of sense now, because in erlang, you don't want to be too concerned about which node a process is running on.

Note that few languages can provide truly Lisp style REPL. For this, the language needs to make no distinction between data and code. You need to be able to generate all language statements dynamically (not string representation of statements that can be then then evaluated, just statements). Erlang does not have this, data and code are different things, so it can't provide Lisp style REPL (The same with Python). Some more info about this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12253200/what-is-so-power...