Learning Erlang? speedbump thread, common, small problems

Question

I just want know all the small problems that got between you and your final solution when you were new to Erlang.

For example, here are the first speedbumps I had:

Answer 1

The thing that took me the most time to get my head around was just the idea of structuring my code entirely around function calls and message passing. The rest of it either just fell out from there (spawning, remote nodes) or felt like the usual stuff you've got to learn in any new language (syntax, stdlib).