[erlang-questions] Why do we need modules at all?

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 25/05/2011, at 12:45 AM, Joe Armstrong wrote:

> 
> 
> On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 1:56 PM, Max Lapshin <max.lapshin@REDACTED> wrote:
> Very strange topic for me.
> 
> I'd like to know if there will be hierarchial modules in Erlang,
> because tree of packages is a rather good idea:
> 
> No it's not - this has been the subject of long and heated discussion and is
> why packages are NOT in Erlang - many people - myself included - dislike
> the idea of hierarchical namespaces. The *dot* in the name has no semantics
> it's just a separator. The name could equally well be encoders.mpg.erlyvideo
> or mpg.applications.erlvideo.encoder - there is no logical way to organise the
> package name and it does not scale -

I should point out that Haskell has dotted names,
uses them to indicate semantics,
and has a *managed* hierarchical name space;
Data.* and Control.* and Net.* and so on are
tolerably clear.

I should also admit that there are occasional complaints
about it not being clear where things have been put, and
other indexing and searching tools are often used to find
things.