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

[Garrett Smith]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 11:29 AM, kraythe . <kraythe@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> I have told you my "green" impressions of OTP and you can dismiss them if it
> make you more comfortable but it wont change the fact that others will have
> those feelings and many will not get on the list and go further. They will
> simply move to Ruby, Scala, Node.js, Clojure, or something else. If our
> attitude is "I didn't want you in the community anyway!" then Erlang will be
> the next Smalltalk or Lisp. Of academic and little more than that in
> significance.

Robert, you're completely on point here and there are many in the
Erlang community who are in sync with you.

I will say that, in defense of our more stodgy brethren [1], the sort
of push you're seeing here has, I believe, contributed significantly
to the quality of Erlang. You have to jump over some *very high*
barriers to get things moved in this ecosystem. The upside is that the
community doesn't spend a lot of cycles solving problems that aren't
glaringly obvious. This "OTP" topic isn't a glaringly obvious problem
to many people. The complexity of the gen_server and supervisor
interfaces -- not glaringly obvious, apparently.

Line numbers missing from stack traces, glaring.

No maps, glaring.

And look how long those took to land.

But as a result, Erlang doesn't face the problems of feature bloat (I
think of Ruby) and ongoing migration issues (I think of Python) that
other languages face. I for one would gladly take the problems we're
discussing here, which I think are relatively small, as a price for
this much more useful conservative mindset that has produced today's
Erlang. Eh, just my point of view.

Garrett

[1] Old guard, don't fret -- you're cool. Hard core old school cool.