Collateral Damage

[Loïc Hoguin]

On 25/04/2022 20:21, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> How, then is one supposed to take comments as the following (emphases 
> added by me):

Let's not get into flame wars please. Some people don't like Elixir. 
Some people do. Who cares. That's not the subject.

> Broadly, this would be the difference between conservationism and 
> conservatism. The former is good. The latter leads to stagnation, 
> irrelevance, and regression.

I don't think you understand conservatism. It's about keeping the good 
foundations (including sometimes what seems good because it's worked for 
a long time, although we don't understand exactly why) and doing slow, 
incremental improvements.

Erlang has always had a very conservative approach to its development, 
in part because it has to maintain forward and backward compatibility so 
that release upgrades and downgrades work. I don't think anyone in this 
thread is against changes to the Erlang language, as we've all been 
through a number of them already. And the Erlang language evolves more 
than one may think from the outside as can be attested by the many 
version-specific macros or other shenanigans many of us have had to deal 
with. This is not what the push back is about.

Cheers,

-- 
Loïc Hoguin
https://ninenines.eu