Erlang

  comes from the functional side of the house.
If you are familar with languages like ML,Haskel,Ocaml you will be right at home.
Unlike lisp,

Erlang

  way of doing things is with matching.

It is designed for telephone

net

 work,
as a result it can serialize/deserialize complex objects very quickly.
also it has ability to pass these arround (rpc).
it has ability to parse complex bit structures very quickly.
As a result it is very good for things like

markov

 , Its tree structure is very fast.

On the downside, very hard to interface with external libs / programs.
This is required for it to be robust.
It lacks many standard feature.

I will use it

markov

  related stuff,
but i will still keep my other tools .

I will check out when i get time the yaws server.
Anyway first impression

Sounds less than cool if it is hard to interconnect... which is a biggie for me.
You're a complete nerd Nop. 

/p

Nah i am an old school cracker.
You need some sort of nasty symbol with a guy with a large hammer hitting crap so it breaks.
you can interconnect using json.
Basically you talk to a process using a pipe.

By interface i mean the ease at which you can access C/C++ libs with like chicken scheme or even

python

 .
with

python

  you can create binding by hand, you have swig, boost, pyrex,ctypes to mention a few which are very mature.

From

python

  -> C++  ->

python

  some latency
From chicken scheme to C++ a lot less latency.

Anyway ...