My favorite thing about Erlang is that the syntax is so simple and terse. And none of it is optional. So its either necessary or it isn't there, and this saves me from a lot of ambiguity issues.

I also like that it practically reads like bulletpoints. There's no cruft or decoration around function definition or internal statements. I was even able to write my CV in Erlang after attemtping 3 other languages first (Elixir, Rust, C) and Erlang was the only one where it didn't look like a jumble of weird code and syntax, and was consumable by executives, engineers and headhunters alike.

My only wish would be that Erlang adopted Elixir's atom syntax, or that Elixir adopted Erlang's variable syntax, because then I could look at my code and know immediately at a glance what was a function, what was a Variable, and what was an :atom.

As it stands in Erlang atoms and functions look superficially the same, and in Elixir the functions and variables look the same.