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Both languages were designed with a similar audience in mind. Engineers who write programs incidental to engineering in another discipline. Telcom engineers in both cases.

Erlang supports gradual typing with type specs and dialyzer. It's not as strong of a type system as ML, but it's pretty handy and not particularly cumbersome.

I think it's still fairly young, but Gleam is an ML family language that works with the BEAM. Specifically, it compiles to erlang.