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Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

The only thing I didn't like about Erlang is its syntax - but I am sure I could adapt. I just don't like too much syntax in general, one reason why I like Scheme.

Now, Erlang's runtime seems fantastic.

I wonder if they (Basho) investigated Elixir recently and their opinion of it.

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Elixir has some good things about it (hygienic macros, protocols, and so on) but the syntax is not enough by itself to make us switch. "Ugh, Erlang syntax sucks" is a refrain heard around the Internet, but it has not hindered us from getting good engineers who are happy to develop with it. I daresay that the syntax is the least of your problems when learning Erlang; the message-passing concurrency and fault-tolerance models, and functional style are more difficult to understand. Those problems don't go away when you use Elixir instead.

If you want something Scheme-like on the Erlang runtime, there's LFE (Lisp-Flavored Erlang): https://github.com/rvirding/lfe

Neat! Does it come in Haskell flavor too?

> I daresay that the syntax is the least of your problems when learning Erlang; the message-passing concurrency and fault-tolerance models, and functional style are more difficult to understand.

That's my feel as well. I hear tirades about commas and periods. What are they going to do when they hit a net-split.

Bashing Erlang and stopping at syntax is like bashing a new battle tank because it doesn't have a leather interior. Yeah it is nice if it had leather seats and a mini fridge but if that is really the main criteria used in picking it, one has to wonder...

If you like Lisp and Erlang's runtime, then check out Joxa: http://joxa.org/

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