[throwawaymaths]

This is a matter of preference, I think. As a non-erlang practicioner I find Erlang to be far more readable than Java (which is good, because IMO Erlang authors have a habit of writing spaghetti code that's poorly organized). As a non-practicioner at some point in Java you run into annotations? Pragmas? and you stop being confident that your mental model of the code is correct. When I run into those I throw my hands up and start cursing.