title: erlang io:format, and a hanging web application
body: <p>While I'm learning a new language, I'll typically put lots of silly println's to see what values are where at specific times.  It usually suffices because the languages typically have available a tostring equivalent.  In trying that same approach with erlang, my webapp just "hangs" when there's a value attempted to be printed that's not a list.  This happens when variable being printed is a tuple instead of a list.  There's no error, exception, nothing... just doesn't respond.  Now, I'm muddling through by being careful about what I'm writing out and as I learn more, things are getting better.  But I wonder, is there a way to more reliably to [blindly] print a value to stdout?<br>
  Thanks,</p>
  
  <p>--tim</p>