[andrewparker]

This is a great page, but it assumes that I (the reader) am already certain I want to invest time learning Erlang. I think it would be valuable if the author would open the page with a brief paragraph on why it's worth investing the time to learn Erlang and some of its tradeoffs vs other languages.

[501]

Collating all the tradeoffs and bugbears would benefit both the existing community and newcomers. Things that bug me that immediately come to mind:

* No public bug tracker

* epmd's security (or lack thereof)

* Can't insist that epmd be started separately (`erl -no_epmd` won't start epmd but it also won't start epmd's gen_server)

* Can't swap out epmd because while `erl -epmd_module foo` is there, `net_kernel:epmd_module()` is barely used. (Although I don't think it's interface is documented anyway)

* No built-in way to hook UNIX signals

* While the documentation itself is pretty good, it's presentation is lacking and it's difficult to quickly correct mistakes as you run into them

* It can be difficult to reason about when a shared binary will be garbage collected

* OS packaging (I'm thinking of Debian/Ubuntu) of Erlang and Erlang apps tends to be more harmful than helpful (old packages, namespace conflicts, etc)