Re: New EEP draft: Pinning operator ^ in patterns

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
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.

> 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.

I am not representing anyone and never pretended so. But I'm not the only one
noticing how something which was supposed to be an innocent proposition turned
out to be the beginning of a roadmap from another company you worked for as a
consultant.

If you had started transparently about how you and people at WhatsApp were
hoping to drive changes to the Erlang language, starting with a new
operator/annotation, you would have received very different responses.

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