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

[Vance Shipley]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 07:15:54PM +0100, Joe Armstrong wrote:
}  OTP was designed for teams of programmers, so that they would all write
}  their code the same way and use common tools for code loading, error
}  logging, supervision and so on.

And this is the power of the environment.  At the end of the day this is
the stuff that put it behind important business applications.  This is 
how it got funded in Ericsson and how it got to be behind infrastructure
at well known companies.  This is why we're talking about, and using, 
Erlang today.  Otherwise it would be cool and interesting in the same 
way that Limbo and Plan 9 were but nobody would be using it at work.

}  There is absolutely nothing stopping you from supervising and restarting
}  programs using spawn_link and trapping exits.

Your boss may be stopping you.  I certainly am in my organization.

}  - beginners should start with spawn and spawn_link then learn to trap
}  exits and then learn that they can replace a lot of simple boilerplate
}  code with the OTP equivalents.

It is interesting that we start teaching Erlang by introducing send and
receive and then as soon as we start writing applications we tell them
never to do that again.  It's not until you have mastered OTP that you 
can recognize where you can handle things better yourself.  Most people
never get there.  Now mind you I'm not talking about scripts but actual
applications which should run whenever the server is running.  For that
you want OTP and if you are putting a 'receive' statement in your program
you are (probably) not writing OTP compliant code.

--

Changing the name is not going to happen and makes no sense anyway.
It's a simple message to say that the problems of the telephone industry
are the same ones the software industry as a whole is facing now with as
we consume cloud services and computers incorporate more and more cores.

You could practically add another name and shift the focus to that.  I
don't see this as necessary but then I'm old school.

-- 
	-Vance