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Tim Bray and Cédric Beust each make good points about Erlang's error reporting. My first reaction was: apparently they've not used Haskell. But coming back around, I do agree that the messages can be confusing, especially to beginners, especially to beginners whose mindset is in the typical assignment-oriented, imperative C/C++/Java model of computing. Pattern matching errors can result in a "bad match" message. When you thought you were doing assignment, and you forgot you forgot you cannot "re-assign" different values to the one some variable already has, then having the system tell you "bad match" is going to cause some grief.