It's inspired/descended from Prolog, and my impression is that many people find it a bit odd. It is at first, but I quickly adjusted to it and quite like it now.

Elixir came from Ruby developers and thus has similarly verbose syntax and macros. Erlang's syntax came from Prolog, which was used to implement the first compiler and is why Erlang's syntax is more concise.

I'm an outsider to this ecosystem, but I've seen a few people share that same opinion. They prefer the explicitness of Erlang.

Elixir is still very explicit from a syntactic point of view. Macros allow hiding a significant amount of boilerplate in certain behaviours, though. So it's a matter of preference, of course.

Erlangs syntax takes a bit of getting used to but it's very pleasant to use once you're familiar with it. I like it a lot.

I learned Erlang at school and used to prefer its syntax for years. However, after giving Elixir a chance and writing 1000 loc I was converted. Now I look at snippets of Erlang in docs with mild disgust.