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This isn't good advice; learning Prolog doesn't make learning Erlang any easier at all (not even the syntax, but especially not the semantics). The syntax of Erlang is actually very simple, and mostly an accident of history since Erlang was originally implemented in Prolog[1].

1 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3542891/erlang-programmin...

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Even though Prolog and Erlang are very different languages that rely on very different paradigms, they do have one thing in common: recursion. Learning Prolog will force you to learn how to think recursively, and will make it easier to then learn Erlang.

That said I'm not sure it's a big win compared to learning Erlang directly.

You may be right - logic programming isn't easy and the semantics are different, so it may make things more confusing for a complete beginner (I learned Prolog long ago). For a deeper understanding I would still recommend trying it.

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