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Comment by LoganDark | Hacker News Reader

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.

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