If you're interested in getting all the benefits of the Erlang VM and OTP, but very little of the bad, please check out Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org/).
It's staggering how fun and easy it is to code in Elixir while leveraging the Erlang platform.
It's staggering how fun and easy it is to code in Elixir while leveraging the Erlang platform.
Does Elixir give you anything other than ruby-inspired syntax?
That's quite debatable, ",", ";" and "." definitely have a logic about them but I wouldn't use "consistent" to describe them. fn/named functions is rather similar (the syntaxes are rather different).
But the syntax is rather small (if noisy and with more keywords than you'd expect), which is good. Still, it's no Smalltalk.
It's not Smalltalk with it's six (IIRC) syntax constructs nor is it Lisp, but compared to the syntax of C++ or other rather baroque syntaxes it is simple :)