I think Elixir may actually make it slightly more confusing because a lot of folks coming from other language expect 'foo' == "foo". That’s why one of the proposals I want to send after v1.3 is out is to deprecate the use of 'foo' in the long-term (and I really mean long-term) in favor of the sigil ~c"foo". It is going to be more explicit and I find using sigils for char lists in Elixir at this point more idiomatic.

erlang charlists. Newbie exercises are bound to create a list of integers and iex will print it out in a surprising way. It’s a fundamental ambiguity that’s completely understandable, but it introduces itself to newcomers in a very surprising way.

For me so far syntax for piping into anonymous function was a bit surprising:
|> (&(&1)).()