Quite often it simply boils down to “$TRENDY_COMPANY uses $THING. $TRENDY_COMPANY is successful. I want to be successful. Therefore I will use $THING.”

There’s plenty of examples of this at large, and it’s a powerful effect that cannot be ignored. Many if not most technologies are successful in spite of their shortcomings, not because of their technical merits ^[1], simply because a trendy and large enough backer pushed for it.

I’d like to expand a bit on this; it’s not so much that we cannot do these things. Of course we could implement time-based scheduling powered by signals/timers, and have actually done so in various flavors over the years without publishing it. We experiment with far more things than people realize.

The problem is that these clever solutions are, more often than not, not very maintainable. There are just a handful people working on the runtime system right now, and we simply don’t have the bandwidth for complicated solutions. Whatever we implement must be maintainable by everyone else on the team with minimal time to switch, and preferably also the community at large.

1. JSON probably being the worst offender judging by how popular it is despite having no redeeming qualities whatsoever. “Human-readable” does not count because you’re going to be examining it through a program anyway, it’s not like you can decipher it by looking at your SSD/wire with a magnifying glass. ↩︎

Damn those Erlang people, always ready to let it crash /s

Oh! Off topic but this is me working from my couch today:

image1200×804 50.7 KB

Was gonna say that it arrived and forgot (it’s been a month or so at this point).

EDIT: Despite my gaff in my previous post of linking HN when I shouldn’t have, I neglected to link in this one when I should have. Get @lawik’s shirts here.