[jknoepfler]

I honestly don't understand how this messes anything up... the elixir syntax produces something semantically equivalent with a lot less garbage. Opinions may differ I guess, but I find your Elixir example much easier to read than your Erlang example (I program in Elixir, so that's not much of a datapoint).

[BoorishBears]

Most of the garbage is because those aren't the closest equivalents.

This is the closest Erlang equivalent:

   fac(0) -> 1;
   fac(N) -> N * fac(N-1).