"I've noticed long-time Erlang users tend to have this mystical ability to see the underlying elegance expressed by the Erlang syntax while ignoring the syntactic awkwardness."

It's just practice. It no longer trips me up, but I still find it klunky and unpleasant after nigh on 6 years of medium-duty usage.

    lists:map(fun (X) -> X + 1 end, [1, 2])

vs.

    map (+1) [1, 2]

Augh. Yes, I'm cheating perhaps a bit with the (+1), but Erlang syntax has enough other stuff in the way for it to still be fair in the end. For instance, the example Joe gave, where you end up with this long sequence of

    IdentifierA = operationA(ArgA),
    IdentifierB = operationB(IdentifierA, Something),
    ...