[erlang-questions] My biggest beef with Erlang

[Christian S]

2007/11/26, Robert Virding <rvirding@REDACTED>:
> or how about:
> (: mod func arg1 arg2 ... )
> for all cases?

It seems like (? ...) and (! ...) are the chosen ways for receive and
send, and (: M F A...) has a nice symmetry with that. That's a thumbs
up. (However, I find that too many one-character symbols to make code
be a bit "naked", I'm a fast enough typist that I dont mind spelling
out full words and I think it makes code more readable in the end.)

My initial feeling was that ':' would only be a reader macro, that
there would be a full form for remote calls, just like how '(a b c) is
shorthand for (quote (a b c)).

As far as I understand, lisp started out being a theoretical model
used to describe/reason about programs, until someone figured out it
would be easy to make a computer evaluate them. It would probably be a
sensible route to start erlang in sexprs too: write some programs,
discover the needed features, then try to build an evaluator for it.