[erlang-questions] Poll on Erlang maintenance, according to Erlang developers

[Fred Hebert]

Hi everyone,

in an attempt to better understand the ecosystem we Erlang developers
live in, I've decided to create a poll on what fellow developers
consider important when working with an Erlang code base that isn't theirs.

The poll can be filled at http://ferd.ca/poll/ and I will be thankful
for all answers we get.

I'll come back with the results later, if enough people want to know
about them.

Thanks for your (potential) participation,
Regards,
Fred.
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[Fred Hebert]

Hello everyone, I've closed the poll and compiled the results.

I'm happy to announce them on my blog, at
http://ferd.ca/poll-results-erlang-maintenance.html

Enjoy!

[Max Lapshin]

Fred, thank you very much.

Last three graphs are very interesting, because it is possible to see,
how understanding of importance migrates in time.

[Mahesh Paolini-Subramanya]

If I'd have to give a personnal guess to explain it, I'd say that the common structure of OTP behaviours and applications tend to give some stricter modularity constraints to a system, on top of wrapping common behaviours under very well known patterns.

I would quite agree with this - it applies across quite a few of the results from your poll, (Importance of OTP, Time to adapt, Factors in maintenance, Knowledge of OTP, etc.)

While not a guarantee, the odds are that the more OTP-like the code, the more likely that a reasonable "Separation of Concerns" has been maintained, with "distribution" and "business logic" being somewhat distinct.

There are also a whole bunch of second-order effects that come into play - if you're using OTP, you probably spent some time figuring out how to actually accomplish the task at hand (w/ the obligatory hierarchy of gen_server, gen_fsm, and gen_event usage :-)  ), etc., which definitely makes other people's lives easier if they have to live/work with your code...

Cheers

p.s. Thanks for the yeoman's work Fred!

Mahesh Paolini-Subramanya

That Tall Bald Indian Guy...

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