[Haskell-cafe] Erlang's module discussion

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 28/05/2011, at 3:37 PM, Brandon Allbery wrote:

> On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 23:10, Tom Murphy <amindfv at gmail.com> wrote:
>>     I sure love Hackage, but there's a very interesting discussion
>> going on, on the Erlang mailing list, about completely restructuring
>> the module-model.
> 
> Sounds like one of those ideas that looks really neat on paper but in
> the real world runs up against the fact that we're absolutely
> *abysmal* at managing that much metadata, and our programs to do so
> mostly reflect our inabilities.

It's fair to say that nobody on the Erlang mailing list was terribly
keen on the idea.  People have testing and documentation and deployment
strategies based on modules that they'd rather not give up.  It seems
fairly clear that it's not something you can add incrementally to a
language:  you'd need a massive new 'ecosystem for code', and the
difficulties people have expressed here with finding things in Hackage
would be doubled and redoubled to say the least of it.

On the other hand, modules as we now know them look like very small
objects in the light of the giant systems they are part of.  (I had to
download a new copy of Eclipse today.  Good grief; to think people used
to whinge about the size of *emacs*!)  So maybe it's less of a jump than
people think.