Entirely subjective yes! ^.^
However what you show is not focusing on syntax differences but rather function differences, even `|>` is an (macro) operator. By syntax I'm talking about things like the `do`/`end` and `fn`/`end` and `,do:`/`do...end` mismatches, things like atom key short-form of `someatom: ...` (being short for `:someatom => ...`) only being useful at the end of it's list/map context instead of everywhere (which is not ambiguous nor have any other reason not to do it that I can see), having functions be callable with or without parenthesis (of which thankfully the formatter default puts parenthesis) when functions really should be defined with or without parenthesis and their usage enforced as such, mis-matches in the AST (when creating macro's) by special casing things like 2-tuples among others, and the really weird multi-arity functions of `for` and `with` that really should have been done via body expressions instead of `,` separated expressions (and thus would not need to be special forms but could then just be normal macros, but they seem extremely out of place for the rest of the language syntax), etc.... etc... etc..
It's just a lot of little inconsistencies like that.
Also, if you want pipes for erlang look at the https://github.com/rabbitmq/erlando parse transform (there are others as well, but I like this one), and if you want a shorter erlang form then look at erl2 (just a layer on top of erlang to shorten constructs like module definitions), and of course nothing beats `lfe` on the beam for succinctness and defineability (being a lisp after all).
Also, your Elixir and Erlang codes do not do the same thing. Your Elixir code is being run at compile-time where your Erlang code is not executed at all, only compiled, and thus will only be run if something calls the `tok:start/0` function. The equivalent elixir would be (formatted by the Elixir formatter):
```elixir
defmodule :tok do
def start() do
"Hello,How,Are,You,Today"
|> String.split(",")
|> Enum.join(".")
|> IO.puts()
end
end
```
And you can leave off the final `:ok` on both as both `IO.puts/1` and `io:fwrite/2` both return the atom `ok` in the end. And even then these are not equal as you are working with charlists with one and binaries with the other, so a more direct translation of the Erlang code to Elixir would probably actually be:
```elixir
defmodule :tok do
def start() do
'Hello,How,Are,You,Today'
|> :string.tokens(',')
|> :string.join('.')
|> (&:io.fwrite('~s~n', [&1])).()
end
end
```
That would make the functions equal.
As an aside, a few other bits, Elixir defines if a function is public/private via `def`/`defp`, meaning you have to search through a file to see what is exposed, where in Erlang you can see exactly what is and everything that is exposed by just looking at the top.
And yes, `do`/`end` may be longer by one line than Erlang's sequence operator `,` usage, but I don't mind it to be honest, and you can replicate it in Elixir anyway kind of like:
```elixir
def start(), do: (
lst = :string.tokens('Hello,How,Are,You,Today', ',');
:io.fwrite('~s~n', [:string.join(lst,',')]);
:ok)
```
Essentially just replace erlang's `->` with `,do: (`, replace erlang's `,` with `;`, and finally replace erlang's `.` with `)`.
Comparing 'function' differences between them is useless of course, they can call each other functions (though macro's are another issue, erlang cannot 'usefully' call elixir macro's, but then again elixir may not soon be able to use erlang's parse transforms either), the differences are the syntax, and Elixir just has a whole ton of oddities.
Overall I find the Erlang syntax (which is similar to SML/OCaml/etc...) far more uniform, sensible, readable, and that it has far less surprising syntactical cases (like why can't I do something like `%{some_atom: 42, "string key" => 6.28}` in Elixir, blah... you have to do `%{"string key" => 6.28, some_atom: 42}` instead for who knows why reasons...).
I do of course use Elixir for my day job, have for over 2 years now, and these are just a few constant things that bug me on a day-to-day basis. However the tooling, macro's, and community (come join us on the Elixir Forums!!!) are top-notch!
If I had my 'choice' of mythical language though, I'd pick something like OCaml with Rust-style ownership semantics with a full staged macro system (Elixir's is a staged macro system) if it were not otherwise possible to safely add in a full Lisp-style macro system (I really don't think so in a full setup like these though, you need a staged system for various corner-case reasons).