New EEP draft: Pinning operator ^ in patterns

[Richard Carlsson]

Den tors 28 jan. 2021 kl 10:57 skrev zxq9 <zxq9@REDACTED>:

> Using COBOL as an example is a bit hilarious. Have you actually written
> a project in it? Have you seen the "evolution" of this language?


I haven't. But I wasn't comparing them on a technical basis. Both are
surviving in their niche - Erlang's could be called "communication oriented
applications" - because there are companies who rely so heavily on existing
codebases that they don't really have another choice but to keep going with
them. Cobol is backed by banks and can probably go on until cockroaches
supplant humans on this earth. Erlang has only a few large sponsors, and
it's still just Ericsson footing the bill for the OTP team. There is very
little greenfield development in Erlang (and I hope there's practically
none in Cobol), so the hope for more large sponsors is low. And in both
cases, I'm sure that if management could wave a magic wand and replace the
old system with a similar one (doesn't even have to be quite as good) in
Java or Go, they would do it in an instant.

this is the rule with any language that undergoes "evolution"
> and is not at all what determines whether a language gains or loses users.


As I said in another mail, I really don't want to build a heap of language
features stacked on another, getting into the language subset swamp. I'd
much rather automate migration of existing code (way more plausible for
Erlang than for Cobol or C++) and drop support for old forms. Maybe version
tagging the language, like Joe used to suggest.

    /Richard
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