[erlang-questions] Maps

[Natesh Manikoth]

Erlang newbie here. This comment therefore is not about the merits of the
proposals.
I detect a certain tendency to dismiss suggestions if the suggestions are
not germane to that particular user's current (or past) needs. Maybe the
suggestions didn't originate from a particular community of Erlang users. I
hope things don't get dismissed because of NIH syndrome.
There are very few (a handful) who take the time and trouble ROK seems to
take to explore and explain the nuances of choices. I have followed his
passionate support of Frames and read his proposal and see the value of
something that replaces records. Since I am not a professional user of
Erlang I will leave it to others to debate the technical merits. I just
hope that folks ask the question whether it has to be an 'either/or'
decision between Maps and Frames - can it be both.

Now I will go back to watching these highly educational exchanges on the
technical merits of the proposals.

-A newbie
On May 10, 2013 9:19 AM, "Tom Murphy" <amindfv@REDACTED> wrote:

> On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 4:48 AM, Loïc Hoguin <essen@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>> On 05/10/2013 05:03 AM, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
>>
>>>      Frames are optimised (pared to the bone, in fact) for use in
>>>      record-like ways.  They are somewhere between pathetic and
>>>      hopeless as general purpose dictionaries.
>>>
>>
>> I think that's the bigger issue with frames. Are they worth spending the
>> time implementing considering they are essentially a records replacement?
>> Records work good enough for most purposes, with the exception of upgrades,
>> which few people do anyway.
>>
>
> One of the things that's very compelling to me about frames as a record
> replacement is that (as I understand it), frames are fully-distinguishable
> as a separate data type.
>
> The record abstraction is *very* leaky. Any Erlang coder who uses records
> has to know about - and contend with - its underlying representation as a
> tuple (insertion into ETS tables, for example, is something that's common
> and trips people up when the first atom (the record tag) is used as the key
> for the table).
>
> Tom
>
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