[erlang-questions] Erland users group (was re: languages in use? [was: Time for OTP to be Renamed?])

[Pieter Hintjens]

On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 3:27 PM, John Kemp <john@REDACTED> wrote:

>> Having
>> spent years working on various standards, I can assure you they are
>> intensely political and are pretty much just an enormous waste of time.
>
> From the point of someone _making_ the standard, I can see that, especially
> if the standard turns out not to get the widespread adoption that rewards
> the effort. I know that feeling.

IME this isn't inherent in standards setting. After AMQP (the
disaster), Steve and I worked on RestMS, which made no splash, yet was
clean and elegant and used a different standards process (the Digistan
model) that avoided any arguments. We have used that model again in
the ZeroMQ RFCs, and there are no flamewars.

Standards are really important. Both for the language (to ensure
competing implementations don't lock in users) and for protocols (to
ensure competition between suppliers).

-Pieter