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Comment by bcrosby95 | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen Erlang syntax? That's why. Even some of the best programmers I know are very superficial.

I find C/C++, et al curly brace syntax and semi colon at end of line, maybe; syntax absolutely abhorrent. Erlang reads like a sentence commas, and period at end. There's very little syntax and it makes sense. The problem it is different than what 90% people learned programming on (curly brace languages).

But the hard part of Erlang is OTP / understanding the concepts or rather unlearning the concepts from other programming paradigms.

i spent a couple of memorable weeks a few decades ago between jobs reading up on erlang, including joe armstrong's (RIP) wonderful phd thesis. when i started, erlang looked "strange" (i hadn't done much prolog in uni). but after being immersed in erlang for a few weeks, when i returned to look at some C/C++ code, they looked positively hideous compared to erlang's higher level functional, and prolog inspired pattern matching syntax.

It does look pretty weird if you have only ever worked in an imperative language.

If one can get past the initial impression though, they'll find it's actually a very simple, nice language. Much simpler than Scala/C++ and probably even Java these days. Also simpler than other functional languages like Haskell. I picked it up in about 1-2 weeks. There's very few gotchas in the language or hidden complexity. It flows well.

I'll also add the language suits the usage pattern. Pattern matching works very well with the gen_server approach. And the binary syntax is so nice if you need to deal with over the wire protocols, as is common in distributed systems.

I don't actually find the syntax to be so bad. It can even be pretty neat with the pattern matching.

I don't think it's bad, but it looks very alien. It's also very simple compared to say JavaScript or really anything else.

I understand why Elixir was born.

These syntaxes arguments are pathetic. It's actually pleasant to both read and write.

Depends on how much one likes Prolog.

Then again, languages lose adoption pitches based on whitespace and tabs significance.

Have you seen the semantical aspects of that syntax?

You're preaching to the choir. I've been singing the praises of Erlang for about 15 years now - since I discovered it via a competitor's open source project.

Same to me. I was just wondering. To me the weird part is justified with the expressiveness and the clarity Erlang brings to the table.

I like it. It took a bit of getting used to ("bit" here used to mean "pretty minimal amount"). I didn't find it to be any sort of hurdle, and Erlang meshes quite well with how I think about programming. It's my favorite language of any that I've used.

Maybe a transpiler and type checker that convert typescript into erlang can help to drive the adoption

That’s Elixir, pretty much.

Purescript has an erlang backend FYI

That's interesting!

I think Typescript would be "easier" for a larger group of developers to hook on

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