Hacker News Reader

Comment by asaph | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who saw the title and thought OTP was "one time password"?

Yes. OTP is engrained in my head as the One True Programming (way of building large systems).

Googling OTP it Erlang comes no 9 in the results. The first three are One Time Password. I think there should be a rule to avoid unexplained abbreviations unless the meaning comes up easily in Google.

I clicked thinking it was going to be about one-time programmable memory.

The domain name right along the title should give you a hint…

Nope. Should really say "Erlang OTP" or something

The URL kind of gives away the theme of the site. And the first sentence starts with “Erlang/OTP”.

Sure: you could just have a list of links with the text "click here" that you hover over to see the url, too. If you haven't worked in the BEAM world those terms packed into a URL might not grab your attention enough to trigger recall, and what are headlines for if not telling us what's on the other side of the click?

>and what are headlines for if not telling us what's on the other side of the click?

Wow, good way of putting it.

Sure, if I spent more than half a second deciding if I want to click something, which I usually don't. This isn't "I can't tell this is Erlang without clicking". This is "there are no obvious signs that it's Erlang without clicking".

“adoptingerlang.org” shows up on the discussion page and the HN main list. No need to click, just to read the word “erlang” that is literally right there. It’s pretty easy actually.

What's ingerlang? Some hip new Norwegian programming language?

ParsingAmbiguityError.

adopt ingerlang OR adopting erlang.

Dude, not everyone knows everything. I'd have to have run into this situation before in order to know to look for erlang in the URL here. Plus, do I ever look at the URL before I click something on HN? no.

I had assumed "OTP" was so incredibly obvious that there was no need to look at the URL, that's all.

> It’s pretty easy actually.

Hindsight is 20/20... blaming user error is pretty cheap when my entire point is that it's easy to make user error.

Quoting the article: "OTP stands for _Open Telecom Platform_, which is literally a meaningless name that was used to get the stuff open-sourced back in the old days of Erlang at Ericsson."

Then maybe the acronym should just be expanded.

That would be unfitting. OTP started as "Open Telecom Platform", but today the long form is not in use anymore. To quote Wikipedia (with emphasis from me):

"The name OTP WAS originally an acronym for Open Telecom Platform, which WAS a branding attempt before Ericsson released Erlang/OTP as open source."

Today, OTP is the name.

To avoid confusions, it would have been best to add "(Erlang)" before the title.

probably not.

here is an answer from mistral-next:

> "OTP" can stand for different things depending on the context. However, in the context of transportation, it commonly stands for "One-Time Password". In the context of fanfiction, it can stand for "One True Pairing". In the context of Atlanta, Georgia, OTP stands for "Outside the Perimeter", referring to the areas outside of the Interstate 285 loop that encircles the city. Please provide more context if you meant a different usage.

Erlang OTP makes no sense... just like X, or Alphabet as company names

The article itself has a blurb that says what it stands for:

> OTP stands for _Open Telecom Platform_, which is literally a meaningless name that was used to get the stuff open-sourced back in the old days of Erlang at Ericsson.

Outlaw Techno Psomething

of course it has to, because no one knows about it... too bad they didnt use it in the title, because even with HN's highly limited title length, I think it would have fit

Reply on news.ycombinator.com