2013 blog post walks through Erlang fundamentals: single assignment, pattern matching, guards, higher-order functions, and list comprehensions with Ruby comparisons.
Key Takeaways
= in Erlang is pattern matching, not assignment; unbound variables get bound on match, bound variables must equal the expression.
Function clauses with pattern-matched heads replace if/case chains; clause order matters since matching is top-to-bottom.
Guards (when X rem 2 == 0) add constraints beyond structural pattern matching without extra conditionals.
Lists are recursive cons cells; head/tail extraction and prepend are O(1); [H|T] destructuring is idiomatic.
List comprehensions ([X*2 || X <- List, X rem 2 == 0]) combine map and filter in set-builder notation.
