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Erlang has so many good things going for it, I think it stands head and shoulders above other dynamic, impure functional languages. Heck, it has actor-based concurrency, failure tolerance, bit-level pattern matching, an excellent development and testing environment, industrial quality libraries, and Prolog syntax. (OK, not everybody thinks that last one is a big plus.)

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The prolog-ish syntax is to Erlang as parentheses are to Lisp -- a humungous barrier to entry for a lot of developers.

I think Erlang's legacy is the fact that it's exposing those other features that you mention to a wide audience of language aficionados that they are spreading (gaining legitimacy/traction) within other languages / libraries.

I like Erlang's syntax. The punctuation rules make sense to me and I appreciate how it allows greater code density on the page. When I do have trouble scanning code, it's generally due to the heavy use of pattern matching for flow control. So, I really don't have any feeling for how much of a problem this is for people.

That said, I want to recommend languages that introduce people to new ideas with a minimum of distractions. If the syntax is an issue, then I should point to alternatives. For the important concepts in Erlang, I'd appreciate suggestions.

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