No, it was also about a production setup. The author boasted about how he after 20 or 30 or whatever years of writing software still only used a text editor and make.

And a programming language where of 5 lines of the most simple program only one is really concerned with what the program actually does, is not a suitable beginner's language, or at least is not of particular use to demonstrate the most basic concepts of programming. From the article:

    -module(hello).
    -compile(export_all).
    start() -> "hello world".

    > c(hello).
    > hello:start().

Compared to PHP's (boo! hiss!):

<?php echo "hello world";

(arguably one would have to add the second command for calling it from the command line to this for a fair comparison; on the other hand the command for starting the Erlang shell wasn't included in the 5 lines either:

    c:\php\php.exe helloworld.php

)