[erlang-questions] Time for OTP to be Renamed?

[Loïc Hoguin]

Historically OTP meant Open Telecom Platform.

Today OTP means OTP. People don't use the name OTP as initials of 
anything. When they say OTP, they refer to a framework for building 
highly available fault tolerant distributed systems.

The same situation exists with many other names. Few can tell you what 
SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, REST, SOAP, HTML, XML, JPEG, PNG and others stand for 
without looking it up and not making a mistake or three. And it doesn't 
matter, the abbreviated name is the one that is used by people, and it's 
the one that holds the meaning. Do you think "Joint Photographic Experts 
Group" is a good name for an image file format? I think not, but it 
doesn't matter, because people call it JPEG.

And just like it, what OTP initially meant doesn't matter, because 
people refer to the framework as OTP, not as Open Telecom Platform.

On 02/12/2014 11:04 PM, kraythe . wrote:
> I am a newbie to Erlang so pardon if the question comes off as impertinent.
> However, as I read more into OTP and see the power it has, I am more and
> more irked by its name. The Open Telephony Platform seems to be a little
> limited and I wonder if it would put off people trying to adopt Erlang for
> other use cases.
>
> I am wondering wouldn't it be better to call it the Open Technology
> Platform? The same initials can be used, but the understanding would be
> that the platform would be a general purpose library (which it is) useful
> for many endeavors, not just writing a phone switch.
>
> Sure it might seem trivial but any marketing guy will tell you, naming is
> sometimes everything. So am I nuts here?
>
>
> *Robert Simmons Jr. MSc.*
>
>
>
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-- 
Loïc Hoguin
http://ninenines.eu