[erlang-questions] What problem are we trying to solve here? [was Erland users group [was re: languages in use? [was: Time for OTP to be Renamed?]]]

[Anthony Ramine]

Replied inline.

-- 
Anthony Ramine

Le 16 févr. 2014 à 12:08, Pieter Hintjens <ph@REDACTED> a écrit :

> The ex-cathedra model can't compete with the rabble in the
> marketplace. So Erlang's greatest challenge IMO is simply shifting
> away from the top down "we decide for you" model to one that is driven
> by users.
> 
> If there's no shift in power by Erlang's current owners to a real
> community driven thinking process, the other options would be to fork
> the entire language and open it up, or allow it to die.
> 
> To present this choice as (a) Ericsson or (b) Random Stupid Committee
> is a false dichotomy. The correct answer is (c) collective ownership
> and decision making with no single points of failure.
> 
> It's no coincidence that the only sustainable organizational model for
> building distributed systems is itself a distributed system. Which the
> Erlang community isn't, today.

Do you mean that truly evil OTP team who sometimes postpone *their very own patches* so that they can apply *mine*, even though I am just a *third-party* contributor with no company to take care of?

The team do not decide for their users, they just ask them why do they want this or that change, and that’s a very very good thing.

Also, what is a distributed community?

> I'd love to learn Erlang, mainly because of the people who use it.
> However I'm lazy and modest in my investments and can't spend six
> months to see profit in a project. I won't use tools I can't improve
> myself. I won't join communities where I depend on others for decision
> making.

That makes no sense, you won’t be part of decision making if you don’t join the community. How do you explain that I managed to make maps be merged later just with a single patch if they don’t take into account the outsiders from the community?

There is also intrinsic value in learning a new tool, even if you won’t use it later.

Let’s not even mention that you need more than six months to learn all the huge Java ecosystem.

> No complaints here. Just observation and comment based on watching a
> tragic number of good projects die because people didn't raise their
> heads up and ask some basic questions about relevance to the market.

Erlang is not going to die any time soon.