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Just to play devil's advocate, you might be able to handle this by hacking types through Erlang's pattern matching syntax.

Thus, you might have a function assign_activity(("KeeferUser", user_no), ("KeeferActivity", activity_no)) and rely on the compiler to match the "type" in the first field of each tuple you pass. It's not pretty, but it is possible.

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There are plenty of ways to skin that particular cat, and languages exist and are successful without modules or namespaces or classes (like C). It's just a question of whether or not the proposal in the article is an improvement upon anything, and I think it's reasonable to argue that no, it's not; people added those features to more recent languages because they solved real problems. Replacing explicit, required, rigid categorization with optional, flexible categorization isn't necessarily a win: it could just mean that people don't actually think about the problem very hard, and you end up being unable to find all the things related to X when you actually decide you need to understand how X works, because people didn't bother adding in the "X" tag in the function metadata to everything related to X.

C has modules all right. A .c/.h file pair is essentially what many other languages call a module, and have all the problems that the modules in Joe Armstrong's fibonacci example also has.

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