söndag, mars 16, 2014

Erlang/Elixir communities

After the keynote by José Valim and Dave Thomas at the Erlang Factory in San Francisco there were of course many discussions on the IRC Elixir channel. Some were advocating a split in the community into two separate communities. I personally think this would be a bad thing for a number of reasons:
  • The Erlang/Elixir combined community is not that large and splitting it into smaller parts would not help any of us. It would also be an easy target of derision: "look only 2 members and already 3 groups".
  • Both Erlang and Elixir are part of the Erlang "ecosystem" and not really independant. This also applies to other languages like LFE and Joxa which are also based on the fundamental principle that the interface between the language and OTP should be seemless. This could easily and unnecessarily confuse people who aren't in the know.
Fortunately, from my point of view, there were others who disagreed with this and would prefer to keep it as one community.

Robert