New EEP draft: Pinning operator ^ in patterns

Raimo Niskanen raimo+erlang-questions@REDACTED
Thu Jan 28 13:30:50 CET 2021


On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 11:02:43AM +0100, Nicolas Martyanoff wrote:
> On 2021-01-28 10:25, Richard Carlsson wrote:
> > If the people who rely on Erlang for their businesses and their jobs have
> > needs that are not fulfilled by the language as it is, then either the
> > language can evolve or those users will eventually move to another
> > language, either on Beam or on some other platform, leaving Erlang in the
> > eternal maintenance realm of Cobol, with no new systems being written in
> > it, and no new users apart from those dragged in to keep some old system
> > running. Would you prefer that? If Ericsson and others found a way to
> > transition to Elixir, for example, would anyone keep paying for maintenance
> > of Erlang?
> Developers whose needs are not fulfilled by Erlang are already using something
> else, and yet there are still lots of new things happening in the Erlang

Bad argument since we are talking about developers who use Erlang and in that
have needs they would like to fulfill.

> world. If Ericsson was to transition to Elixir (why would they ever do that?),
> other developers would probably take on the work on Erlang/OTP. Or maybe not.
> Speculations such as "if we do not do X now then it will die" usually turn out
> wrong.

Still I think that if e.g WhatsApp and Klarna left Erlang for something
else the Erlang community would be in a much worse position.


> 
> > Also "pressure" is a strange word to use when I'm a single person trying to
> > make a case for a suggestion which I myself have no vote on, while you on
> > the other hand claim to represent the community at large. If you rephrase it
> > in a less paranoid way as "Why take a risk with a new language when you can
> > try to convince the existing community to accept your changes", it becomes
> > an entirely reasonable statement.
> Well call it what you want, but there was a first post here a long time ago
> which received mostly negative reactions, followed by an EEP and a PR which
> did not mention the first exchange, then you and Raimo sending dozens of
> emails to anyone responding negatively to tell them forcefully that they are
> looking at it wrong and the proposition is a good thing.

"forecefully"...

I recall it as I asked for not just negative reactions, but arguments about
about the proposal that was not good.  Got arguments that I thought did not
hold, countered those arguments, and then got more just negative reactions.

-- 

/ Raimo Niskanen, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB


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