I never understood why Erlang syntax has been so commonly maligned. I had no trouble getting through Joe Armstrong&#x27;s <i>Programming Erlang</i> in less than a week, and the syntax never required any conscious moment to &quot;click,&quot; it just flowed right past. The only exception at first was the operator precedence rules inherited from Prolog, but those are memorized quickly.<p>I also didn&#x27;t have in-depth prior experiences to non-ALGOL languages all that substantively. I had experimented with Scheme, OCaml and REBOL (and read documents on Prolog, but barely typed much of it) before, but nothing fancy.