Interesting interview, though I must admit I can't stand the format of the site - I always copy the whole transcript into Emacs, m-x fill-individual-paragraphs, and read it there.

This part really jumped out at me:

"If you do generic programming in Haskell, you can write a paper about it. If you do generic programming in Erlang, it's 4 lines - one for lists, one for tuples, one for basic values."

I'd like to hear from someone with more Haskell experience (it's not my thing), but it helps here that Erlang matches and dispatches by structure, not types per se. It's common to use a tagged tuple, like { point, 1.5638, -2.4144 }, for informal type annotations, but they're not mandatory.

Another significant difference between Erlang vs. Haskell and OCaml is that since Erlang is dynamically typed, it can far more easily accommodate incremental changes without having to stop it. Doing static validation of changing types in a running, distributed system adds major complexity, with many of the same problems as handling schema changes in a database. Erlang's design reflects that it's probably simpler to let it fail and put effort into recovering gracefully, rather than trying to make it bulletproof.