Erlang forums (was Re: PING TEST)

[Benoit Chesneau]

Mailing-lists allow you to keep content on your side and share it with
others without requiring a central website like Discourse does. All
protocols based on the mail are taking care of the decentralized design of
the Internet from retrying a message to also ensuring you can keep aside
things and share it without requiring a local authority. Which is good imo.
Especially in open source world.  I personally like to archive some mails
per topics and have a look when needed. This is proper usage of mail.
People that always complain of not being able to order/triage their inbox
will also not be able to maintain multiple sources of knowledge.

Forums may have their use but don't replace mailing-list for now until they
don't allow the usage I am describing. I don't see a need to remove the
mailing-list as well . If the goal is to bring less work to the OTP team
which is perfectly understandable, I think the ecosystem can find a place
for it. I am wondering if the OTP team is open for that. What do you think
Kenneth?

About Elixir winning blah blah, this is untrue. They have different usages
and users. Elixir may have appeared more under the light because it is
actually used in majority by companies that need to show off. Companies
that require external investment for ex. Which is not the case for all. And
still you will see some startups using Erlang. Don't forget that a lot of
big projects in Erlang used by the largest companies are still based on
 Erlang/OTP. It's a shame in fact there is less communication about it
these days. Anyway this is off-topic.

Slack, central forums etc.. are actually removing the diversity we used to
find before.   One true thing  about these new stuff is that they remove
the control the user used to have about their interactions. Just because
slack has a nice UI (?) doesn't make it more powerful than IRC. Companies
offering offline history with IRC or nice UI have existed since a long time
also. Same for others open decentralized protocols like XMPP/Matrix....
It's fine they exist but  is there any good reason to discard others?

Benoît

On Sat, Dec 18, 2021 at 10:48 AM Daniel Widgren <daniel.widgren@REDACTED>
wrote:

>  I think the mailing list has had its role in the community, but I can't
> see any discussion in this list that we can't have in a forum. More than
> people will not be there because they don't like Forums. My feeling is that
> we lose more new developers or companies because we have a mailing list.
>
> When companies look around to see if they should use Erlang or Elixir,
> Elixir will win. The reasons are straightforward, and they can see a
> community, have a better discussion and adopt new approaches.
>
> This list has had some good runs, but for me, Forums and Slack community
> have been so much better than this list or IRC. I am not saying they are
> perfect, and we maybe change to something else in a couple of years.
>
> This Forum is ten years late, and we should have unified somewhere long
> ago. If things aren't changing, Erlang will be a building block for Elixir,
> and it will be even harder to convince companies why they should use Erlang.
>
> Den lör 18 dec. 2021 kl 10:21 skrev Eric Pailleau <
> eric.pailleau@REDACTED>:
>
>> Thanks Yao,
>>
>> I couldn't tell better my feelings on this.
>>
>> I'm not against the forum, I did a try, but my feelings is that both are
>> not the same goal.
>>
>> We need to keep mailing for some subjects to be discussed with OTP team.
>> And also announcements.
>>
>> Forum is helpful for helping new comers, creating groups around some
>> applications etc.
>>
>> Regards
>>
>>
>> Envoyé depuis mon mobile
>>
>>
>> ---- Yao Bao a écrit ----
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>>
>>
>> Erlang bring us together as a community, we don't share data
>>
>> between processes, but we do share love from Erlang.
>>
>>
>>
>> It is not common for programmers say "love" to a programming
>>
>> language. Erlang programmers might not use Erlang in daily job,
>>
>> but we are willing to put some of our life and energy into this.
>>
>> Personally, mainly because of the uncommon beauty of it.
>>
>>
>>
>> Yes, we are still marginal. And this might be the root cause of
>>
>> this movement. I can understand it, but why can't we have both?
>>
>>
>>
>> Yes, resources are always limited, and we can't split energy into
>>
>> two things equally, this is understandable. But having both, or,
>>
>> in a foreseeable future, we might discover some better methods
>>
>> to organize our community, then we can say this is the true "rich"
>>
>> community. New generations are good and unavoidable, but I
>>
>> hope we can keep the old generations as much as we can.
>>
>>
>>
>> Every once in a while, some shiny things appears, and we are
>>
>> not against shiny things, they are good, if it is good enough to
>>
>> replace the old one entirely, nobody will miss it. We just need
>>
>> sometime to prove it.
>>
>>
>>
>> We can deprecate language features, but I hope we do not
>>
>> deprecate people. Shiny tools can attract young generations,
>>
>> I don't know the story or history about Elixir forums, but I would
>>
>> say the biggest difference would be the origin of these two
>>
>> languages. Of course it is good to have a try, after receiving the
>>
>> new Erlang forums announcement, I give it a try almost
>>
>> immediately, and personally prefer this mailing list for now.
>>
>>
>>
>> Although as we see, this mailing list is not very "active", but we
>>
>> really care about it. And this might be why some "sad" emotion
>>
>> comes along. If we don't care about it, we would not say any word
>>
>> about it.
>>
>>
>>
>> I really hope this mailing list is still alive. Maybe one reason would
>>
>> be good enough to keep it: old generations are still alive.
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Yao
>>
>>
>>
>>
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