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

[Joakim G.]

Ulf Wiger wrote:

<snip>

>>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.
> 
> 
> I was expecting this retort. What kept you? (:
> 
> For those relatively new to Erlang, Martin and Magnus
> Fröberg (also at Nortel) used to work on the OTP team and
> support the application controller, release handler, global,
> etc.(**)  Even then, most of the others (e.g. Klacke and
> Jocke ;) in the group didn't really know all that stuff, and
> didn't want to know. I have no objection to this, but
> remember that both Klacke and Jocke have had the good
> fortune to have some of the top experts in this area sitting
> next to them. Then it's easy to just forget about all that
> complexity and what it does for you. This is as it should
> be.

We are lucky indeed having Martin and Magnus on the team. Very
so! I'm very glad.

The more problem for other projects which don't have Martin,
Magnus and Uffe onboard. There isn't many out there with their
OTP capacity which actually understands how to benefit the most
from OTP. Things could be simpler. That's the only thing I'm
saying. No offense.

<snip>

> /Uffe
> 
> (*) This has a downside, though. One of our finest
> programmers once tried to demonstrate to some sceptics how
> easy things were if you used Erlang, but he found that he
> didn't know how to put together a distributed OTP-based
> system from scratch. Some quick-start examples are badly
> needed.

What a good example. Thanks. :-)

> (**) Others (e.g. Lennart Öhman) have been involved as well,
> but of the people I know to be at Nortel now, I think M&M
> were most active in this area. Jocke designed INETS and
> fathered Eddie, and Klacke, well... lots -- Distributed
> Erlang and Mnesia (and, IIR global and rpc), for example. I
> would not think of trying to belittle their achievements in
> any way. Just suggesting that they could both afford to
> forget about many of the problems that OTP solves.

For sure. But we also see things OTP solve for us which we
rather see it didn't. Stuff just adding steepnes to the
Erlang/OTP learning curve.

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.