It's worth noting that Erlang gets a lot of that weirdness from its progenitor language, Prolog, where arguably some of that stuff makes more sense. For instanc

It's worth noting that Erlang gets a lot of that weirdness from its progenitor language, Prolog, where arguably some of that stuff makes more sense. For instance, the =:= operator is an equality operator that forces arithmetic evaluation, unlike = which is just used for unification. In Prolog, this is a fairly crucial difference ("1 + 1 = 2" is false in prolog, while "1 + 1 =:= 2" is true) and there needs to be language constructs that make the distinction clear. Given that, having different operators is a sensible solution to the problem. On the other hand, it's arguably true that Prolog has an over-reliance on a massive swath of operators. All of these operators represent some variation of the concept of equality: =, ==, =:=, =@=, #=, and "is". The differences make sense if you're deep into Prolog, and it's rich capacity for designing new operators is arguably a strength of the language, but it's clearly an obstacle to beginners. I absolutely adore Prolog, but it's a real shame that development of logical programming basically stopped with it. It would be as if functional programming never properly progressed beyond early Lisps. Its a shame that Erlang borrowed so much of its syntax, when the syntax is clearly not its strongest suit (though it fits Prolog better than Erlang).