I'm with you for "subjective". Though "strings are UTF8 binaries" ain't that bad. Or first-class, MD documentation. Or the pipe operator. Or a number of other niceties. :-)

Well, Erlang has been picking up :)

- OTP27 added sigils[0], which allow you write UTF8 strings with just an additional tilde character

    ~"hallöchen" =:= <<"hallöchen"/utf8>>

- Also, since OTP27, Erlang's own documentation[1] is written in Markdown and created using ex_doc[2] - doc attributes etc. have been added in OTP27 as well, I think - You can use ex_doc in your own Erlang projects using rebar3_ex_doc for a while now[3]

I also miss the pipe operator, but there seems to be some opposition against it in Erlang-land (and it would need to be adjusted as Erlang's standard library doesn't put the "main" argument consistently in the first argument slot like Elixir does).

[0]: https://www.erlang.org/blog/highlights-otp-27/#sigils [1]: https://www.erlang.org/doc/readme.html [2]: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/writing-documentation.html [3]: https://hexdocs.pm/rebar3_ex_doc/readme.html

The benefit of a syntax developed this century is that you can have the strings people probably want with the syntax for strings they probably want.

But for someone coming from java and javascript, I don't think Erlang or Elixir are going to feel particularly sane. As a person who got into Erlang before Elixir, I was hearing about a new BEAM language with 'sane syntax', and then disappointed when I saw it didn't have what I was looking for most, angle brackets. Oh well, it seems to make a lot of people happy, and it gets more attention on BEAM, so it doesn't need to make me happy does it. :)

“Oh no! How could anyone possibly learn to a sentence with a period?!”