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by atombender 461 days ago
I think OTP is pretty much universally admired, the language syntax and tooling much less so.

Erlangers generally dismiss criticisms about syntax as unimportant, but looking at the popularity of Elixir (which compiles to the same VM) suggests they're wrong about discounting syntax as important when it comes to adoption. Another new language that targets the BEAM VM is Gleam, which looks fantastic.

From reading Armstrong's stories about the origins of Erlang, it seems to me the Prolog syntax was an accident of history and a pragmatic engineering decision at the time, more than it was the deliberate choice of a careful language designer. That suggests that other options shouldn't be dismissed.