You do have to get to grips with pattern matching and processes as objects being such core concepts, but I found that once I got it, it is wonderful.
The core team will insist that variables are immutable but bindings are mutable, but in my mind variables are their bindings (there is not a third category distinct from the value and the lexical binding).
I think there is huge debate as to whether this is good or bad - I think though you really really want to have mutable variables in the REPL. In your static code it's trivial to check for variable rebinding and be sure you're not doing it (credo makes this easy to set up)
This feels like flawed thinking to me. I know what you're saying, but claiming that variables are mutable would lead me to believe we could have things like counters. I would say it's best to think of variables as the memory address of their binding. We are allow to rebind the name. That's how I see it, at least.
Anyways we can't have traditional counters, because of 1) lexical scoping rules and 2) value immutability.
The punctuation rules are very similar to English: comma means you’re not through with your thought yet, semi-colon means you’re introducing a new clause, period means you’re done with the entire thought.
Agree, at least when looking at code statically. It's a bit of an inconvenience when editing though. For example, re-ordering lines in a function / adding a new line to the end. That leaves a full stop at the end of an intermediate line and/or a semi-colon at the end. Compiling/running that without fixing (assuming you didn't spot it) can lead to cryptic compiler errors.
I find this hits me a surprisingly large number of times. Maybe it's just the way I write code. But it is an annoyance (for me anyway).
To be fair, any decent editor/IDE will highlight the error. None that I'm aware of has an auto-correct though.
It's a minor annoyance in the great scheme of things. Erlang remains one of my favourite languages. Writing REST services as OTP applications on top of Cowboy* is a very rewarding experience and generates rock-solid, highly scalable, production-quality binaries.
*Webmachine was even better though sadly now not actively maintained.
