> Erlang is not really that fun or exciting to use
It depends what you use it for. Its brilliant for infrastructure - software that has to live forever and survive no matter what gets thrown at it. It makes a lot of the hard problems go away so you can focus on the fun and exciting stuff.
interesting, I actually like it. The syntax took some getting used to but I find with functional languages I think more and write a lot less and spend a lot less time debugging.
I found Armstrong's book useful also, as well as the tutorial at erlang.org
When you consider all that's in CouchDB, the smallness of the code base is impressive. I think that's a direct consequence of the choice of Erlang.
I have to state that writing something this big in Erlang was bold, really, really bold.
Erlang is not really that fun or exciting to use