I also like how such rather large changes are being introduced in a language that has been in production for many decades. That is pretty remarkable.
Erlang is still not really all that popular, but has always had a lot of Important Code in production thanks to Ericsson, which has made it more difficult to change even though there are some things that even the creators acknowledge as not particularly elegant.
It is both a blessing and a curse. If a service or program doesn't crash and cause a lot of drama and headaches it also doesn't get noticed in a certain way.
I forgot who mentioned it (one of Erlang Factory talks probably), but for example if you access the Internet via your smart phone, there is like a 30% change that it goes through Erlang at some point (due to going through Ericsson's servers).
yes there is probably > 30% chance of that. the space that you are looking for is mobile-packet-core, and is dominated by ericsson, csco (via starent acquisition), and to a lesser degree by alu, nsn etc.
Google basically solved this problem for themselves with gofix. I'm surprised Erlang doesn't have an equivalent, given that it would basically just be a reuse of the "parse transform" code.
Python added a set builtin in 2.4 and a literal syntax in 2.7, Objective-C added NSNumber, NSArray and NSDictionary literals only last year.
It is like adding built-in maps to C++ or Java or C. Python set was similar. And there was talk about whether {} should be an empty set or a dict. It stayed a dict. I remember it.
But also in mid 90's already large production systems were written in Erlang while Python was still experimental. Python 2.0 was released in early 2000s or so.
"Significant" and "large" are different things. A change can be small and significant, and large and insignificant.
> It is like adding built-in maps to C++ or Java or C.
It's like adding built-ins to anything. Your point?
> Python set was similar.
Similar what? It was a new builtin and literal to a language which did not have a builtin (let alone literal) set.
> And there was talk about whether {} should be an empty set or a dict.
Which is relevant how? Also not really, `{}` becoming an empty set literal was taken off the table more or less immediately when the introduction of set literals was being discussed.
> But also in mid 90's already large production systems were written in Erlang while Python was still experimental. Python 2.0 was released in early 2000s or so.
You're joking right? Python 2.0 was released in 2000 (October), which would quite obviously mean that Python 1 had preceded it by a few years (6), and most things are usually considered not experimental by the time they reach version 1. Python had stopped being experimental more than a decade before sets were added.
If you'd read my comment you'd understand. The point was that adding a new built-in to an almost a 30 year old language is unusual. Adding a new built-in to Dart is probably a lot easier. So not it is not "like adding built-ins to anything".
> > Python set was similar. > Similar what?
Wild guess but well I don't know the topic we are discussing -- maps to Erlang. And by extension adding a major built-in type to any established language.
> > And there was talk about whether {} should be an empty set or a dict. Which is relevant how?
It is not. Just making conversation remembering from years back. Sheesh...
Now if say Nimrod or Dart acquired built-in sets (I don't know maybe it already does) it wouldn't be too remarkable. They are pretty experimental.
Also there is a difference between having a library and a language built-in. All those languages including Erlang, have libraries that provide associative data structures.
Support the runtime, support the syntax and semantics, change the pattern matcher, write extensive tests, add it to the term_to_binary/binary_to_term protocol, add it to distribution, enable reading of maps in various function calls, enable NIFs to inspect maps, define how to copy maps between processes, change the core compiler.
It isn't so simple.