As a fan of Erlang, it might have been better to stick to your initial point rather than trying to disagree with tjogin about what is/isn't a central purpose of

As a fan of Erlang, it might have been better to stick to your initial point rather than trying to disagree with tjogin about what is/isn't a central purpose of GCD. That tangent was orthogonal to the syntactic elegance you wanted to highlight. Of course, if that sort of thing was a core design goal from the outset it damned well should be more elegant! It's much harder to bolt closures on to C, and a bit of syntactic elegance had to be traded off to make it happen, no doubt. I'd say they did a fine job given the constraints. My favorite touch: they chose a glyph for the block pointer that was actually pointy: ^ I don't want to detract from Erlang, because you were right to highlight what it does so well...but it's nice to see these ideas make it into the C foundation of a mass-market operating system in a manner that is both central and grand, even if the syntax isn't quite as tight.