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

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

This is topical for me personally, in a rather sad
sort of way.

Currently, the part in Government in this country is
the National Party, who are to the left of the Republicans
on things like gay marriage and health care, but pretty
similar in terms of thinking that public assets should be
in private hands, the jobless are shirkers who must be
*made* to work whether there are jobs for them or not and
whether they are fit to work or not, the insane are best
in the community, things should be done by private charity
rather than public welfare, etc.  There was a public
referendum not long ago on flogging off public assets to
the National Party's mates and the Prime Minister announced
beforehand that the Government knew what the result would
be (people were against it) and didn't intend to pay any
attention whatever.  Then there's the NSA spying scandal,
where NZ is firmly in the back of the USA's trousers,
licking hard, and NZ citizens -- including apparently an NZ
MP -- have been spied on ...

So the Prime Minister announces it is time for a new flag.

Did we split apart into several countries, like Yugoslavia?
No.  Did we go through a profound upheaval, like the CIS?
No.  Have we booted out Her Majesty and the Governor
General?  No.  So what _do_ we need a new flag for?

To distract the public's attention from serious issues.

Me, I'd rather see the time and money wasted on the
arguments, on the forthcoming referendum, and what the
National Party have already decided to do anyway,
spent on trying to do something about child poverty.

Smart programmers will investigate Erlang/OTP _whatever_
it is called and choose it if it's appropriate.
Programmers who would dismiss a language simply because
it has libraries called Open Telecom Platform have minds
that I don't want anywhere near anything I depend on.

Why don't we spent some time arguing about the design of
a 'HiTMan_erL' library for generating HTML documents
with embedded scripts and styles instead?