New EEP draft: Pinning operator ^ in patterns

[Raimo Niskanen]

On Tue, Jan 19, 2021 at 11:48:21AM -0000, Wojtek Surowka wrote:
> > I am really puzzled by this kind of reasoning. Developers who believe that
> the way bindings and matching works in Erlang is a problem and that Elixir
> fixed it are free to use Elixir.
> > It is really disturbing to see a small number of developers trying to
> force this change down everyone's throat even though the reactions are
> mostly negative. At this point, I agree with Ivan Uemlianin that "pushing it
> through would damage the community".

It is really disturbing to me to see a small number of loud developers
killing any attempt of discussing a feature's pro's and con's by
accusing anyone who tries to do so of forcing a change onto the community.

This used to be a list for constructive discussions.
Apparently those days are over.

This new discussion tone has already damaged the community.


> 
> I agree 100%. The most problematic part for me is that the proposed change
> is not backward compatible. I saw arguments that it will impact only small

And here come another one...

Read the proposal.  Read about possible migrations, optionallity, migration
paths, and related, before posting.

> percentage of the code and the code will be easy to fix. I understand that
> Erlang is used in different contexts, and in some of them it sounds an easy
> thing to do. But if a system uses several third party applications/libraries
> managed automatically by rebar3 the problem is much worse. A
> backward-incompatible change would mean that the an upgrade makes my system
> not working anymore, and I do not have an immediate and good way of fixing
> it, if incompatibility is not in the code I have under direct control.
> 
> Does anyone know last time when a backward source incompatibility has been
> introduced? I do not mean adding new things like maps. I mean breaking
> changes, causing that code which could be used in release X cannot be used
> in release X + 1.
> 
> --
> Wojtek Surowka

In anger
-- 

/ Raimo Niskanen, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB