New EEP draft: Pinning operator ^ in patterns

[Eric Pailleau]

I agree, 
do not let Erlang be the new Cobol, 
But please do not let Erlang be the new Java, too. 

Apart:
I would prefere OTP team working on namespaces to let modules with same names working nice with others projects. 

With several download sources (hex, git etc... ) it becomes a nightmare. 

Regards 

Envoyé depuis mon mobile 

---- Richard Carlsson a écrit ----

>Den fre 22 jan. 2021 kl 12:57 skrev zxq9 <zxq9@REDACTED>:
>
>> Why is using Elixir not good enough? It already exists.
>>
>
>Because there are companies with several million lines of Erlang code, and
>hundreds of Erlang developers (most of whom are not on this list). The code
>is not going to be rewritten in anything else. They need to keep their
>current developers happy enough not to leave for other jobs with languages
>that give them a better user experience, and they need to attract new
>people when others leave or teams grow - new people who have to get up to
>speed fairly quickly and not ragequit within a year. Fortran and C++ is no
>longer the competition. Rust, Go, Swift and TypeScript is. Even Java and to
>some extent Scala. Elixir has its own comfy niche in the Beam community
>where it's doing great stuff, but has not yet proved itself for the
>telecom-kind of large applications like at WhatsApp, Ericsson, Cisco and
>Klarna.
>
>On a side note, I don't even know enough Elixir to write a whole program in
>it (not proud of that, just haven't had time - I still think of it as a
>kind of Ruby), and I wouldn't have known about their ^-annotation unless
>someone else had told me. To me it just seems like a pretty good solution.
>
>I think Erlang needs to keep evolving, lest it becomes the Cobol of telecom
>and the only people on this list 10 years from now are the same people as
>today. We need to look honesly at where Erlang's ergonomics could be
>improved, and not hold on to the survivorship bias of our own "works for me
>and I've been doing it for decades" experience. The question we should be
>asking is how many people went out the door again because they felt other
>languages offered something better to them. Not change for change's sake,
>but change to reduce friction, churn and confusion, and to enable better
>tooling. Of course, safe, incremental change is the only way to do this.
>
>It is clear that many people don't believe that ^-annotations are any good,
>so that might not happen. I can live with that. I can even live without
>warnings about already bound variables - I've done that for a long time.
>And if we go for only the warnings and no annotations, many people will be
>unhappy anyway because they may then be forced to use guards only (because
>of company coding standards, or if the open source thing they contribute to
>start enforcing the warnings for their code). It also becomes unlikely that
>it would be possible to backtrack and add ^-annotations later on, because
>by then everyone has turned their matches into guards already and won't go
>through the code to change it again, so the opportunity for an easy
>transition like the one I did on the OTP code base is lost.
>
>Why not discuss eliminating shadowing entirely? Is there some reason
>> this suggestion has not been addressed at all? It is a curious omission
>> given that it has been brought up multiple times.
>>
>
>I think this has been at least briefly discussed in some other branch of
>this thread - but it's a good point. We definitely know that there is some
>confusion there, particularly with shadowing of variables in list
>comprehensions (which work just like funs, for the generator patterns). For
>example, some people would write
>
>    get_all(Id, List) ->
>        [X || {Id, X} <- List].
>
>But Id is just as new as X in the pattern (you would get a warning for the
>outer Id being shadowed and the inner Id being unused, though). Similar
>mistakes can be made with funs, but people tend to have a better idea of
>how they work.
>
>What would happen if we'd allow already-bound variables in these patterns?
>If someone uses shadowing today, it wil break their code, hard. I know it's
>not common to do this and to disable the warnings for shadowed variables
>but some people do it, and for them it would be a silent and breaking
>change. Maybe we can sacrifice them, maybe not.
>
>The other thing would be that you could no longer move around a fun or list
>comprehension to a different location and expect it to keep working as
>before - and I think that particularly for funs, this is a fundamental
>assumption with most people, even if they don't use shadowing today. If you
>innocently cut and paste a simple "fun (X) -> X+1 end" or "[f(X) || X <-
>lists:seq(1,10)]" into another context, you have to be sure that X doesn't
>exist in that context, or your fun/comprehension will quietly start to try
>matching on that value instead. I think this would be too much for most
>people. Adding the warning about already bound variables would tell you
>this happened, at least, but you'd have to change the variable name just to
>get it to work again in the new location. My instinct is that this is
>something you don't want for funs.
>
>    /Richard
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