> "erlang was kinda off doing its own thing, syntax-wise, and so some of it is just Like That now." The syntax makes a lot more sense if you go into the histor

> "erlang was kinda off doing its own thing, syntax-wise, and so some of it is just Like That now." The syntax makes a lot more sense if you go into the history (well-documented) and understand that Erlang's initial implementation was in Prolog and a lot of the syntax can be seen as a consequence of that. As for pattern matching in the function signature instead of forcing dropping to a case expression, it removes a level of useless and noisy indentation and, again, is a lot more like Prolog. Even the use of , and ; as separators in Erlang make sense given that heritage. In Prolog a sequence like this: A, B, C. Can be read as "A and B and C" while: A; B; C. Can be read as "A or B or C". So function bodies using , as a separator and ; between alternatives with . as a terminal follows straight from Prolog.