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Sure, but perhaps that is not a battle this particular group wants to fight.

BTW, Erlang's syntax has some annoyances that go beyond just not being C. "Ant turd tokens", for instance. Nothing that's going to stop a competent developer, of course.

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I've never got the "And turd tokens" thing after using the language for a few days. It pretty much all makes sense to me.

I've already posted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=837217 to express my opinion on that though, if you want to read it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=837462 - the answer to your post - sums up nicely why they are annoying: they make it so that one line of code is often not interchangeable with the next, so when you refactor or cut and paste, you have to go fiddle with line endings.

Perhaps the "competent developer" is not what they are aiming at, but the masses. In fact, this would explain a lot of languages using C-like syntax if it were true (not to say that those which do are any worse/better than those which do not, he said back-pedalling :).

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