> Well, Erlang has kind of a cumbersome syntax, and it is hard to learn for someone who has never seen a functional programming language.
Ok, the syntax is weird (and sometimes infuriatingly so), but I didn't find it that hard to learn, and I had never seen a functional language (I came from mostly PHP, with some perl, and a small amount of C and/or C with a C++ compiler, and a little bit of Javascript). Single assignment is new and different, but really the only thing that really causes problems with is something like a for loop; and you learn the two or three ways to do a for loop differently pretty quickly. C, Perl, PHP and Java all have function pointers too, you just don't use them as often.
The important thing is starting to learn Erlang on a project that has a lot of concurrency, so you're making that part of the project easier in exchange for having to learn to think a little differently.
Ok, the syntax is weird (and sometimes infuriatingly so), but I didn't find it that hard to learn, and I had never seen a functional language (I came from mostly PHP, with some perl, and a small amount of C and/or C with a C++ compiler, and a little bit of Javascript). Single assignment is new and different, but really the only thing that really causes problems with is something like a for loop; and you learn the two or three ways to do a for loop differently pretty quickly. C, Perl, PHP and Java all have function pointers too, you just don't use them as often.
The important thing is starting to learn Erlang on a project that has a lot of concurrency, so you're making that part of the project easier in exchange for having to learn to think a little differently.