[rvirding]

I think it would be dangerous if Erlang's syntax were to resemble that of another language like Java or C. Especially for beginners. That is because if things look the same you expect them to behave the same, and Erlang's semantics is very different from those languages whose syntax people think it should be like.

There is no getting around the difference in semantics. For this I think that having a different syntax is actually better. Also there are things in Erlang which are hard to fit syntactically into the syntax of OO languages, for example pattern-matching.