[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?]]]

[Mark Allen]

On 2/17/14 8:50 AM, "Garrett Smith" <g@REDACTED> wrote:
>Grabbing required source into a single directory and compiling
>everything, independent of shared system code, is, in my experience,
>much more reliable.

I agree with you here to the extent that it effectively replicates an
isolated development environment much like virtualenv or rvm provide for
Python or Ruby.

>I think I'm going to call this a feature, not a bug.

TL;DR:  When it's *obvious* there is a great Erlang implementation of X,
github is fine. Otherwise, it is totally crappy.


To encourage broader adoption, Erlang *does* need some kind of maintained
package index that roughly consolidates the community's package
preferences into something more meaningful than "I needed to support
function X in Erlang and I found these 3 projects using Google."

Because that's a crazy way to expect n00bs to find solutions to real
problems they're having.

I assure you as someone who "recently learned" Erlang - about 18 months
ago - I cannot count the number of times I have started working on
implementing a story for my $JOB and frittered away an hour or three
searching Google and github.com looking for "<foo> Erlang" before I
reinvent the wheel.

The simple fact is that if you're not part of the "Erlang community" via
this mailing list or what have you, you will at best find pointers to half
completed abandon ware on Google code, obscure blog posts written three
years ago and so forth.

There have been several times when rather waste time implementing
"WebService-X for Erlang" I just go ahead and use the official Python
library hanging off a RabbitMQ consumer.

Cheers,

Mark