Is erlang too small?

[Mickaël Rémond]

On Mon, 10 May 2004 13:36:08 +0300, Einar Karttunen  
<ekarttun@REDACTED> wrote:

> On 10.05 12:27, Mickaël Rémond wrote:
>> You are not doomed to use a flat namespace. Package have been introduced
>> in Erlang. The mechanism is not yet very popular, mainly because of old
>> habits (to speak about myself), but packages work:
>>
>> http://www.erlang.se/publications/packages.html
>
> That does not really help. Currently there are tons of modules on the
> toplevel and moving them deeper into a hierarchy would break all code.
> Of course one can do sensible things with one's own code but that is
> little help as long as the whole bundled library is a single huge
> namespace.

I agree, but you do not need to invent new mechanism built into the  
language. The mechanism is already there and just need to be used.

> In my opinion the real problem is not so much technical, but
> organisation of documentation. Currently if I need some functionality,
> it is quite hard to find it. Of course this is a nonissue for
> people with many years of experience with the library, but it
> makes things harder for newbies.

I agree. We are trying to help with this on Erlang-projects. Something  
like CPAN for Erlang is already in discussion, althought it will take some  
time to emerge.

-- 
Mickaël Rémond
  http://www.erlang-projects.org/