OTP vs. non-OTP (was: A Joeish Erlang distribution (long))

[Martin Bjorklund]

"Joakim G." <jocke@REDACTED> wrote:

> I would avoid OTP at least for a middle sized software projects
> involving 5-35 programmers.

Can't just listen quietly anymore...

It's very interesting to hear opinions from different people; people
who have built shipping erlang products and people that have not.
Interstingly, people who haven't shipped products seem to think that
OTP is an unnecessary burden, and people who actually have built
products tend to like the support OTP gives you.

In your case, and klacke's (except for yaws, see below), you have other
people around you that take care of the productification; building
software packages, taking care of upgrades, start of the system,
configuring the system etc.  You think this is better done w/o OTP?
Fine, go ahead and prove me wrong.

Of course it's possible to do this without OTP, you can do anything
with a turing machine...


Klacke wrote:

> >>You would not divide the processes into behaviors? 
> > 
> > 
> > Nope

Oh yes you would and you even do that.

> > I actually do use applications. Not that I like them but if I want to
> > write an erlang program that fits into the otp tree I must do that.

Right, and this is one of the objectives for OTP - if you structure
your code as an application with behaviours other people can easily
integrate it into their own products.  Since even you wrote Yaws in
this way I think we succeded!


Now, of course OTP is not perfect.  As been stated before, the
documentation needs to be better.  However, it's not _that bad_.
People (on this list e.g.) who are actually facing a real problem (not
just theoretically thik about it) have read the docs (and code) and
use OTP to solve the problem.


To comment on the original subject on this thread, I would also like
to see a more modular Erlang/OTP distribution from erlang.org.



/martin