[erlang-questions] Time for OTP to be Renamed?

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 13/02/2014, at 11:56 AM, Loïc Hoguin wrote:

> 
> The same situation exists with many other names. Few can tell you what SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, REST, SOAP, HTML, XML, JPEG, PNG and others stand for without looking it up and not making a mistake or three.

Let's try.

	Simple Mail Transport Protocol
	Internet Message Access Protocol
	HyperText Transfer Protocol
	REpresentational State Transfer
	Simple Object Access Protocol
		to be honest, my first thought was
		Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program,
		but I don't suppose many people use IBM 650s
		these days.
	HyperText Markup Language
	eXtensible Markup Language
	Joint Photographic Experts Group
	Portable Network Graphics

How did I do?  (Really no lookup.)

One reason it's worth knowing what the acronyms stand
for is that they can stand for different things.  It
could be embarrassing to speak critically of XML to
someone and then discover that they think it means
"X-Men Legends".  Or to speak about membership in the
ACM and learn that they're thinking of the Academy of
Country Music.  A discussion of SOAP when one person
is thinking "grotesque abuse of XML" and the other is
thinking "cute assembler for strange old machine" is
not going to be fruitful.

OTP could be One Time Pad, Open Trading Protocol,
Outline Test Plan, or any of an number of other things
relatable to Erlang (and more that aren't).
"We're using OTP to implement OTP using an OTP for
authentication; here's our OTP for it."