Erlang is getting too big

[Bjarne Däcker]

What an excellent discussion topic
for the after beer session at the coming
Erlang/OTP User Conference !

http://www.erlang.se/euc/03/

CU

Bjarne


----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe Armstrong" <joe@REDACTED>
To: "Sean Hinde" <sean.hinde@REDACTED>
Cc: "Erlang Questions" <erlang-questions@REDACTED>
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2003 2:38 PM
Subject: Re: Erlang is getting too big


> > Hi,
> >
> > An observation from the trenches.
> >
> > There are huge problems out in the real world getting companies (or
> > even other departments) to adopt Erlang. One of the arguments in favour
> > of Erlang has been that it is a "small" language so the overhead of
> > learning it and, vastly more important, supporting the applications
> > written in it is small.
>
>
> On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, Sean Hinde wrote:
>
> Yes
>
> > This is no longer the case, and from what I see on the mailing list and
> > in conferences there is a strong push towards adding more obfuscation
> > to an already large and (for C++ types) confusing language.
>
> I think there is a lot of talk here but not much action :-)
>
>   Sure there  is a lot  of talk about  things that would be  nice, but
> this  does  not  mean to  say  that  the  language  is growing  in  an
> incontrollable manner - I have ofter argued that "If we add something"
> we should  "take something out" and  I think this is  still and always
> the case.
>
>   IMHO  Erlang is perceived  as being  large because  the distribution
> keeps  growing  in  size -  this  is  because  the language  and  the
> applications  are  not distributed  separately  -  so  it becomes  very
> difficult to distinguished exactly "what is Erlang".
>
>   I would very much like to see the distribution split as follows:
>
>   1) "The  language" +  the  *minimal set  of  libraries necessary  to
> compile and run a simple application.
>
>   2) A set of applications
>
>   - o -
>
>   Now 1)  is (roughly) the compiler,  the run-time system  + *half* of
> the  modules in  stdlib  and kernel.  This  is not  large. My  earlier
> stand-alone Erlang sytems achieved 1) in less than 1.44 MBytes.
>
>   2) Is potentially huge
>
> - o -
>
>   The Erlang OTP system is actually three things
>
> - The language
> - OTP
> - A number of applications
>
>   But the boundaries are not clearly visible.
>
>   I think it would greatly improve things if we could release the
> basic language stuff, OTP and the applications separately - so that the"
> distinctions become clearer.
>
>
> /Joe
>
>
>
>