Oh, I never meant it as a gripe at Erlang's syntax myself. However, there is so much untapped power that the developer community is missing because Erlang is immediately dismissed. People will try node.js, but not Erlang. I'm seeing Elixir as a chance for the Erlang VM to finally get wide-wide adoption it deserves.

Absolutely, agreed on all points.

I really appreciate the work Meiklejohn (disclaimer: former co-worker) is doing to make Erlang more powerful. As I like to say, Erlang gives you better distributed/concurrent primitives than other languages, but they're still primitive.

What people don't get is that Erlang syntax can literally be described in one page. The syntax and the language are very shallow (in the minimalism/simplicity way). When helping someone learn Erlang, most of the questions are around macros/dialyzer annotations, creating a Hello World app, why OTP has things named the way it does ...