Erlang's syntax is not my favorite, but as a professional programmer, it's just something you deal with. You get used to it, and in the end it's ok to work with. Over time, as a programmer, unless you live in some kind of Java silo, you are going to deal with lots of different languages and syntaxes. I've used, professionally: C, Tcl, Perl, Python, PHP, Java, Ruby, Erlang, SQL, HTML, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting. After a while, you get to the point where you can pick something up and use it and appreciate what's good about it without getting hung up on its warts, unless they are such that they really prevent you from being productive. Erlang's syntax does not fall in that category.