I thought the same thing once, until I actually sat down and tried to learn Erlang. It turns out that a lot of the decisions that I originally thought were asinine, actually make a lot of sense.

Line terminators for example (, ; .) tend to receive a lot of flak, but they really aren't as crazy as they first seem. Commas come after normal lines of code (you can read them as and), semicolons come at the end of clauses in if or case statements (and you can read them as or), and periods mark the end of a function. It's a little more verbose than something like Javascript or Ruby, but it really isn't as confusing as critics tend to claim!