Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Personally, I'm looking into Erlang right now... the "kernel" and "stdlib"
> documents are together 800 pages (something like 60 pages of one-line
> descriptions for routines in Kernel), and all the stuff in between is
> just huge.
>
> Contrast with C#, where each library is pretty well distinct, for the
> most part. You can read about the regexp library without even knowing
> about the existence of the dynamic-code-loading library.

Why is it any different with the Erlang library?  I've just taken a look at
stdlib in http://erlang.org/doc/pdf/ and, though a big document, the various
modules it describes as part of the "standard library" are clearly all distinct
and separate from each other, with an occasional reference to related
functionality in other modules.

Perhaps what bothered you is that the unmaintained docs are kept in PDF files
without links rather than a cross-referenced tree-based Windows Help file?

> I think for anything particularly useful, you're going to have big
> libraries anyway.

I didn't say otherwise.  I said .NET is closed and non-standardized and C#
without it is like bread and no butter -- well, much worse actually...

> It's hard to build an "enterprise" class application
> without a whole bunch of stuff, so why not design a library for
> enterprise-class applications and actually use it in your system?

Actually, the thing that p*** me off about Java libs or .NET or even Python etc
is that they're all just a bunch of redundant -- but perhaps a bit more
convenient -- wrappers to existing OS functionality.  In the case of Java or
Python at least, this leads to cross-platform ease.  In the case of .NET, it's
just Windows2 on top of Windows1, really, for no reason other than captivating
an evergoing mass of programming enterprise drones that prefer to type
FileAccess.ChangeDirectory(dir) rather than cd(dir) or something...

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