A Joeish Erlang distribution

[Joakim G.]

Miguel Barreiro Paz wrote:
>>If you want a *Telecom* platform. Please, go ahead use OTP! It's solid and
>>does what it's suppose to do.
> 
> 	But then probably gen_server, gen_fsm et al are not exactly
> "Telecom". What is exclusively Telecom in Erlang? The ASN.1 compiler?
> H.323, LDAP and Kerberos5 are all spread in the common, non-Telecom world
> :) and their wire formats are specified in asn1. The CORBA apps? the GNOME
> desktop is as little Telecom-oriented as it can be and gnome apps
> communicate to each other using CORBA. SNMP? Pieces of software as
> commonplace as the Squid http cache or Windows2k have an SNMP interface
> and are not generally considered Telecom world only.
> 
> 	My point is that OTP is not really Telecom-only. The gen_*
> behaviours especially. And half of the usefulness of Erlang is due to that
> set of design principles, libraries and applications that has the bad luck
> of having a "T" for "Telecom" in its name.


Supervisor trees.

More and less complex restart strategies.
Possible to nest supervisor in supervisor trees to group gen_servers having
this or that common crash recovery pattern. Hot code swapping, which we
never use in the field anyway etc = To much generic robustness library
functionality.

All this to make it possible to build really large, soft real time, robust
systems. This used to be the charcteristics for Telecom projects. This may
have become relevant for *all* software projects out there today. It's just
a pity that so few has understood this (at least if we compare the Erlang's
user base with for example Python's.).

I believe it would be easier to gain more Erlang followers if we had a
simpler middle way to achieve what OTP promises, i.e. the thing I propose.
If you think the user base is unimportant or me being silly and rhetoric
you are probably right.

Cheers
/Jocke
-- 
If you think the pen is mightier than the sword, the next time someone
pulls out a sword I'd like to see you get up there with your Bic.