Okay, when I first saw that I thought it looked bad, like PHP or something. But then I realised strings are just [char], and that's not so bad. Compiling away the labels sounds like a good optimisation, especially given the wire format and evolvability. Three line terminators? Ugh, but no worse than "public static void".

If Erlang is suffering, why has no-one written a better front end compiler with saner syntax or a static type system?