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Comment by rambocoder | Hacker News Reader

IMHO when Ericsson decided to remove "experimental pmods" support from Erlang in version 16, the compiler magic in ChicagoBoss turned from "oh cool" into a liability. Ericsson's development team did release a workaround example, but the whole process how this went down left a sour taste in my mouth.

My wish is that Ericsson's Erlang development team became more transparent to the outside world, shared their bug tracker, code reviews (Go team does this wonderfully) and did all development in the open. Then we would not have these situations https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/687 and it would save me ton of time couple years ago chasing after ssl bugs.

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The Ericsson team does plan to open up things like that.

But pmods shouldn't be used like an example of them going against the community in driving the language forward. Very very few people in the community objected to their removal. Many of us were happy and thought it should have happened much earlier.

> The Ericsson team does plan to open up things like that.

It seems they have been planning it for a while. One of the things that looks nice about Elixir is that there is a lot of doing, as well as planning.

Removing features is a lot harder than adding them :)

> when Ericsson decided to remove "experimental pmods" support from Erlang in version 16, the compiler magic in ChicagoBoss turned from "oh cool" into a liability.

It caused a bit of hassle, but not much, really. It was a feature that many Erlang people did not like much in the first place, so heavy use of it put them off to begin with.

I agree with you that it wasn't that much of a hassle technically, just wish that the announcement was done with more transparency instead of "OTP Technical Board" met somewhere and this is what was decided http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2012-October/06...

Reminds me of Microsoft's .NET development process from 10 years ago, huge corporation drives development of a platform behind closed doors with very few people from the outside having any idea what is coming in the future.

I wonder if IEUG made any more progress on their TODO list https://erlangcentral.org/industrial-erlang-user-group/join/ in Publishing OTP backlogs and Public issue tracker...

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