[erlang-questions] Package Support/Use: Episode IV - A New Hope

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

"Ulf Wiger" <ulf@REDACTED> wrote:
	Anyway, erlhive's use of packages is ... different.
	It's sort of a community framework, where the calling
	convention for using other user's modules is
	
	   erlhive.User.Module
	
How fortunate you are to have no name clashes amongst Users!

One year when I was an undergraduate at the University of Auckland,
I got my exam results in the mail as usual.  I opened the letter
cheerfully, and got a nasty shock.  C, C-, D, F, what the heck?
How could I possibly have done so badly?  Hang on a bit, I didn't
sit in any of those papers!

Yes, there was another Richard O'Keefe.

Now that's in one city with about 800 000 people.  Extrapolate that
to the whole population of web users.  Pity the Smiths, Changs, and
Singhs of this world!

What this means in practice of course is that the names used in
the dotted module names (for which erlhive_User_Module would have
been every bit as good) have to be managed by erlhive and cannot be
freely chosen by users.  In fact, you might as well maintain a
data base mapping users to surrogates (as in William Kent's "Data and
Reality") and the surrogates might as well be 7 base-36 digits
assigned at random.  (Enough to give everyone on the planet 13 surrogates.)