Re: [Haskell-cafe] Erlang's module discussion

On 28/05/2011, at 3:37 PM, Brandon Allbery wrote:

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 23:10, Tom Murphy wrote:

...

I sure love Hackage, but there's a very interesting discussion going on, on the Erlang mailing list, about completely restructuring the module-model.

Sounds like one of those ideas that looks really neat on paper but in the real world runs up against the fact that we're absolutely *abysmal* at managing that much metadata, and our programs to do so mostly reflect our inabilities.

It's fair to say that nobody on the Erlang mailing list was terribly keen on the idea. People have testing and documentation and deployment strategies based on modules that they'd rather not give up. It seems fairly clear that it's not something you can add incrementally to a language: you'd need a massive new 'ecosystem for code', and the difficulties people have expressed here with finding things in Hackage would be doubled and redoubled to say the least of it. On the other hand, modules as we now know them look like very small objects in the light of the giant systems they are part of. (I had to download a new copy of Eclipse today. Good grief; to think people used to whinge about the size of *emacs*!) So maybe it's less of a jump than people think.