Re: New EEP draft: Pinning operator ^ in patterns

On 2021-01-27 12:41, Richard Carlsson wrote:
> Here's another one I should have answered earlier. Although it's no secret
> and it's been written about in some places, I'm also sure that not everyone
> heard it: During 2020, a team at WhatsApp - including myself as an external
> consultant - was working on prototyping a "modernized Erlang", exploring
> various ideas for making Erlang a better language for large scale
> development.
> [...]
> As you may also have heard already,
> this direction was put on ice at the end of 2020, because it seemed like it
> couldn't provide a transition route quickly enough. The project continues,
> but for now focusing on incremental improvements. But the team also looked
> at things like scoping, naming, modules, and data types, and is very
> actively contributing to the Erlang Language Server.
> [...]
> As the project changed direction, we thought that we should at least try to
> push out those ideas that seemed viable and useful as incremental changes

It now makes much more sense. I really wish people at WhatsApp working on this
project were actually here on this thread; it would also have been a lot
better if this had been clearly explained at the beginning. Because yes, it is
now clear that there *is* an agenda to try to change fundamental things in
Erlang (yes, I get, "incremental improvements", words are everything).

I really wish people who want to see a language go a different way just create
a new language of their own instead of messing with what exists and is liked
as it is. José Valim did it successfully with Elixir, so yes it is possible.

Of course, I get it, getting "adoption" (i.e. getting other developers to
produce tools and libraries for free) is valuable, so why take a risk with a
new language when you can try to pressure the existing community into
accepting your changes ?

-- 
Nicolas Martyanoff
http://snowsyn.net
[email protected]