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

[kraythe .]

You would be surprised how many dorks in companies will fail you in an
interview for not knowing the full acronym expansion. As a result the only
one I had to look up was, in fact, OTP.

*Robert Simmons Jr. MSc.*

On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 4:56 PM, Loïc Hoguin <essen@REDACTED> wrote:

> 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
>
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