[strmpnk]

The original claim is just as pointless. The implication that Elixir fixes Erlang's syntax is so commonly repeated without much discussion that it has many folks dismissing the entire language before they learn it.

I think both languages have issues with Syntax but in the cleaner department, I am baffled at the insistence that Erlang is hard. Inconvenient, maybe but most of the features in Erlang are so primitive that there is little to no ambiguity of what something can mean.

Verbosity strikes both (records and binaries in Erlang vs the sigil and keyword heavy Elixir code) and certainly some folks prefer rebinding variables and colon syntax on atoms but it's certainly not without real trade-offs in common idioms (tagged tuples, special casing required for atoms like true, false, nil, interop with Erlang becomes uglier, etc).