Note that while I generally like the Erlang syntax, there's one main issue where syntax quirks come back to bite me: the combination of Erlang records with a mi

Note that while I generally like the Erlang syntax, there's one main issue where syntax quirks come back to bite me: the combination of Erlang records with a missed line ending. This topic comes up on occasion on the mailing list and apparently it's a side effect of a change that was made to make Erlang records a little easier to work with. In short, if you've got two records in a list, and forget to end the first one with the comma line ending, the behavior becomes a bit unpredictable. [ #myrecord{ field1="whatever", field2=123 } #myrecord{ field1="booyah", field3=3.14 } ]. That statement would mysteriously return a list with a single element: [ #myrecord{field1="booyah", field2=123, field3=3.14 } ] And all because of the missed comma after the first #myrecord { }. What's happening can be visualized by the (sort of) equivalent version here: R1 = #myrecord{ field1="whatever", field2=123 }, [ R1 #myrecord{ field1="booyah", field2=3.14 } ]. So you can see that the second #myrecord is overwriting the values in R1, since you can do syntax like R1#myrecord{ ... } to take the values of R1, and overwrite them with whatever you need to. The reason that happens is due to a compiler change a while back to make record syntax no longer require being wrapped in parens. This is due to having records with values in them being records, and it makes it easier to access those records. For example: Mybook#book.author#author.name Which is an OOP language's equivalent of something like: Mybook.author.name This previously used to be required to be written like this (correct me if I'm wrong, this syntax is before my time): ((Mybook#book.author)#author.name). Which removed ambiguity. Errors like my first example then would be caught by the runtime if records were written in the "old" style: [ (#myrecord{ field1="whatever", field2=123 }) (#myrecord{ field1="booyah", field3=3.14 }) ]. Will generate an invalid function error (still not a great error, but it makes sense in this regard. My hope is that this class of error caused by the syntax will be somewhat minimized if Ericcson decides to merge the erlson[1] project into an official release of Erlang, replacing the somewhat clunky record syntax with something a little more "modern". [1] https://github.com/alavrik/erlson https://github.com/alavrik/erlson - An object notation for Erlang, but which in order to be a decent record replacement will need to support pattern matching.