I am close to using a behaviour as a pure interface and I feel dirty...

Brett Hemes brhemes@REDACTED
Tue Aug 24 23:46:30 CEST 2021


> Erlang's behaviour is NOT an interface!
> If you are looking for some analogy from other languages the closest one is abstract classes in C#.

This isn’t very helpful...  it is the exact same response I find in the forums with no reasoning behind it.  I don’t need analogies either; I understand what behaviours are “supposed” to be from the documentation and comments (perhaps this wasn’t made clear by my post).  Where I fall short is “why” are behaviours limited to such and why aren’t more people asking the same questions I am stuck on (regarding polymorphism)?  My logic was: yes, this has been asked and discussed some in the past with no real resolution that I could find... therefore, users must be content/accepting of the tools provided.  I am not so naive to think I am the first to need/want such, so there must be a disconnect.

I posted my example to motivate my questioning hoping for some insight and/or comfort.  As of now, I have proceeded with storing “meta refs” to my child servers that are module/reference tuples (along with some dangerous and future-maintenance-issue-causing assumptions regarding their “interface”)... and it’s works... it just smells, and I am always eager to learn and find the right/better/best way.

Aside: a colleague came across this repo (https://github.com/eldarko/epolymorph) while digging and the readme seems to capture my use case almost exactly...

Brett
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