Erlang was created in the 80s as a layer atop Prolog. Not surprising that it doesn't look like C or Python. (You can always use Elixir if you want something mo

Erlang was created in the 80s as a layer atop Prolog. Not surprising that it doesn't look like C or Python. (You can always use Elixir if you want something more modern-looking, or lfe if you prefer Lisp. Personally I like Erlang's syntax because it's concise and helps me think in Erlang, vs Python or Ruby.) I'm a big fan of languages that pick an area of expertise. Perl for text processing. Erlang for robust, concurrent operations. Fortran for numerical processing. Kitchen sink languages (yes, I'm looking at you, C++) try to meet every need and don't do anything as well as a specialized language can. Erlang does its job so very well because it makes tradeoffs that other languages can't. Arbitrary integer sizes, for example. Asynchronous message passing with mailboxes. Immutable data. Those are unacceptable for a language that's trying to break speed records.