"I love Erlang but I cannot get the past the syntax."

I also thought this. For some reason though the more I use it the more I am coming around to its syntax. There are lots of gotchas when compared with other popular languages, but still its syntax has grown on me recently.

At the opposite end of the syntactic spectrum is Lisp. The more I use Clojure the more I am loving it as well.

"The future of server programming does not have parallel access to shared memory."

I agree. The future of server programming is also not spawning multiple child processes. The question I have is how far off is that future? I know that most of my web applications today simply run in multiple spawned OS processes.