Agreed. I was writing a port of the redis protocol to erlang for a personal project that's a server using said protocol as an interface for distributed MPSC "locking", and it was incredibly simple to implement because of erlang's binary strings and pattern matching. Same with base64/hex/etc. manipulations of strings into binary data. I've read a fair bit about how erlang is great for protocols, but hadn't experienced it myself (professionally or personally) until I decided to implement this project.