[erlang-questions] Spec is diabolical IMHO

[Raoul Duke]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 11:24 AM,  <freza@REDACTED> wrote:
>> ah, yes, bring back c/++ style .h files and all their glory! ;-)
> And I thought ".sig" would be recognized as obvious reference to
> Standard ML... :-)

i missed that, since i haven't had the good fortune of using SML for
nigh 20 years now, and have only rarely done anything related like
ocaml or f# or whatever else. more is the pity, sucks to be me.

but look at it this way: some people, when faced with the problem of
having a single source file that has embedded metadata (be it user
docs or type annotations or whatever), say, "i know! i'll split it
into 2 files!" of course, now they are faced with /two/ problems.
that's why e.g. java tried to get away from that, and the go language
was invented.

i'm not saying 1 vs. 2 files has a clear best answer for everybody,
just that both choices have problems. in the end, this feels to me
like yet another concrete example of why 99.five9s% of our development
ides are stupid crap that don't really help with the real problems. we
should not have to worry what files they are in or if we do/not have
to see them, the ide should magically take care of all that. but
that's a pipe dream of course these days.