the Hopwood design process

[Bjorn Gustavsson]

I think that confirms David's statement that it is vanishingly rare
that features are removed. At the time you removed your features, the
user base must have been much smaller than it is now. Nowadays we have
trouble removing even minor (mis)features.

During the time that I have worked with Erlang/OTP (from Dec 1996),
I can only remember that we have removed two major features:

- Zombie processes. They turned out to be not as useful as originally
  thought.

- Vectors. Similar to your nukeable arrays, but there was an exception list
  to allow updates in a functional way. Removed because of disappointing
  performance.

/Bjorn

Claes Wikstrom <klacke@REDACTED> writes:

> David Hopwood wrote:
> > Instances of features being
> > *removed* from a programming language in the course of its incremental development
> > are vanishingly rare. Partly this is because of backward compatibility, but
> > mainly it is because the cost of retaining a feature is rather low.
> 
> I know of at least two language features/constructs that I implemented
> for Erlang many years ago _and_ also removed them.
[...]

-- 
Björn Gustavsson, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB