After programming in elixir/erlang for ~8 years (for fun and professionally), I have to agree. I've had to dig into the "why" of BEAM a number of times, and I can't remember ever being disappointed. The decisions that they make might be frustrating at the time ("why does passing a shared sub-binary through a process prevent it from being GC'd") but I always come away from the docs with the understanding of how the design decision was the right one in the context of the larger system, which is very pleasant. They just took a handful of requirements around concurrency and fault tolerance, and all decisions logically followed from those. BEAM is not good at everything, but it is good at the things it wants to be good at, which is refreshing.