Hi, I'm the creator of the project, as some comments say, the idea is to make it easier for people that find the erlang syntax confusing to be able to start coding with the fundamental concepts that erlang provides and by doing it making more likely to jump to erlang (or keep coding in efene if they want :). the code can be compiled to bytecode or translated to erlang to see how the code would look like, so it can be a learning exercise to jump to erlang too.
There seems to be more than one group trying to associate a language with nicer syntax with Erlang's virtual machine. Another attempt is Reia, a language more inspired by Ruby and Python: <a href="http://wiki.reia-lang.org/wiki/Reia_Programming_Language" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.reia-lang.org/wiki/Reia_Programming_Language</a>
While I welcome <i>all</i> Erlang-spreading efforts, I quite like the Erlang syntax.<p>It initially looked more ridiculous than managed C++, but after about seven months of daily Erlang programming it's the most natural thing ever.<p>The problem with C-style syntax is that it encourages the diversity of coding conventions. Python makes everyone's code look about the same because of its ingenious whitespace-handling rules. Erlang's syntax appears to achieve a similar result because of its ... weirdness.
That's an interesting development.<p>I'm pretty sure that the syntax of Erlang is one of its main stumbling blocks, it is very far off the beaten path (and imo ugly), which means an immediate shortage of people that can program in it.<p>Grafting a C like language on top of the Erlang VM should theoretically give you the same kind of stability and scalability without the drawback of having to fish in a pool with all of 5 programmers in it (and they'll be working for a telco somewhere anyway).
The problem with minority syntaxes always seems to be that if you don't know the real language you won't be able to read any of the existing code (especially in tutorials/books) out there.