I just want to be a little picky here about release handling. It is NOT a language or libraries feature, there has been support in OTP from very early for releases. Support both for building them, see the :systools module in the SASL application, and for doing configuration at startup time. It is the mix tool which in the beginning chose not to provide support for building releases. I don’t know why.
And I really agree Fred Hebert has written some really interesting and good stuff, both books and articles, which are also extremely readable. His Learn You Some Erlang also describes releases 
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