i spent a couple of memorable weeks a few decades ago between jobs reading up on erlang, including joe armstrong's (RIP) wonderful phd thesis. when i started, erlang looked "strange" (i hadn't done much prolog in uni). but after being immersed in erlang for a few weeks, when i returned to look at some C/C++ code, they looked positively hideous compared to erlang's higher level functional, and prolog inspired pattern matching syntax.