[erlang-questions] yet more ranting about Erlang docs

[Michael Turner]

On 2/18/2010, "Dave Smith" <dizzyd@REDACTED> wrote:

>You seem to have a lot of angst, friend. From my perspective, Ericsson
>is making significant, observable progress towards opening up their
>development process.  In the past 6 months, they've made more progress
>towards opening up the Erlang/OTP codebase than Sun did with Java in 6
>YEARS.

I haven't been watching.  I think it was at some point well *over* six
months ago when I wrote to someone at Ericsson to ask why there were no
test suites in the release.  He replied to the effect that they
couldn't even consider it, since there were so many different platforms
to test on first, so it would be a very long time before we'd see any. 
This struck me as odd thinking, especially from an open source point of
view.  After all, if you want to get a lot of coverage for your test
suites on a variety of platforms, well, why not *release them*, so that
people who run on various platforms can help?

I'm glad to hear that things have improved since that exchange (which
left me a little dispirited).  But maybe it changed in part because
people express some "angst" sometimes?  As someone who is in business
for himself, let me tell you: if I didn't get some bitter doses of
"angst" now and again from unhappy customers, it would probably signal
doom up ahead.  It would mean that people had given up even on
criticizing what I have to offer.

> When I look at the quality of the Erlang VM (esp. considering
>the complexity it hides) compared to say, Ruby or Python's VM, I'm
>very glad that we have paid professionals maintaining it ....
[snip several paragraphs about the VM and dev/maintencance process].

I don't disagree.  But, um, weren't we talking about the Reference
Manual, not the VM?   And I think Joe has just said (if not in quite so
many words) they *don't* have a professional maintaining that.  It
shows.  Hence this discussion.

-michael turner