I found Erlang to be much easier to digest the second time through. The first time I looked at Erlang, I knew of its benefits, but didn't have much experience with functional programming. The unusual syntax and unfamiliar paradigm led me to put it aside.
Later, after I learned me some foldr and flatMaps (mostly thanks to Martin Odersky's Scala/FP course on Coursera), I revisited the language when I saw an article here about an Erlang based CMS (http://zotonic.com/). It seemed pretty cool, I host some websites for local businesses, so I set up it to evaluate it and realized that I now had no trouble at all with Erlang and the syntax made more sense. Searching around for some other web stuff I found Chicago Boss (http://chicagoboss.org/), a Rails-inspired web framework with ridiculously easy Comet/WebSocket/"real time" support.
Now I'm really excited about it and I can't wait to do some cool things with it.
My experience was quite similar, although it took me three tries to get it. I think it was http://learnyousomeerlang.com that finally helped me understand enough to really start to enjoy Erlang.
I've also found similar - I wonder if there's something about functional programming that means the language syntax /has/ to be obtuse...
(Similar with Haskell too -- learning that at university, I loved the concepts, and I'm sure it's technically great, but the APIs seem almost deliberately horrible; one-character variable names, array append and prepend being called "cdr" and "car" or something like that, stuff like that all throughout the standard library and tutorials. I don't care that there's a historic reason for that based in the PDP's Lisp-to-assembly compiler, if the function's job is to append it should be called "append()" -_-;; </rant>)
Later, after I learned me some foldr and flatMaps (mostly thanks to Martin Odersky's Scala/FP course on Coursera), I revisited the language when I saw an article here about an Erlang based CMS (http://zotonic.com/). It seemed pretty cool, I host some websites for local businesses, so I set up it to evaluate it and realized that I now had no trouble at all with Erlang and the syntax made more sense. Searching around for some other web stuff I found Chicago Boss (http://chicagoboss.org/), a Rails-inspired web framework with ridiculously easy Comet/WebSocket/"real time" support.
Now I'm really excited about it and I can't wait to do some cool things with it.