[erlang-questions] Twoorl: an open source Twitter clone

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 5 Jun 2008, at 9:52 pm, Joe Armstrong wrote:
> Appending things to a input queue *and never deleting them* seems to
> me a perfect way to deal with things.
> If you every want to delete things it can only be for pragmatic
> reasons and should be done years later
> in a garbage collection sweep. If you never delete things you can
> always go back later an fix errors!

I note that this is one of the reasons why SAP is successful.
Businesses use SAP because they *can* use SAP; their national tax
departments are happy with SAP.  Their national tax departments
are happy with SAP because they can *audit* business data held in
SAP.  And they can do *that* because (ta-dah!) SAP never deletes
anything!  If there is an incorrect data entry, for example, you
can mark it as incorrect and replace it with a corrected record,
but you cannot remove the old record from the system.

I note that you can now buy a
Western Digital WD10EACS 1 Terabyte 7200 RPM disc drive for
USD 253 (which is currently NZD 330), price from pixelUSA.com.
Deleting stuff makes a lot less sense than it used to.