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Why did this get modded down? It seems informative and it's on topic. I don't know Erlang. Is this information incorrect or something?

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It's true, but it's far less of a problem than it may seem. When your functions are short it's easy to find out where the error was from the error message.

When you think of all the great stuff Erlang gives you, small issues like these don't matter (and they do get fixed with time, the OTP team is very responsive).

(I didn't mod jlouis down just to be clear.)

Doesn't it sort of play against the idea that Erlang is ready for prime time though? I mean, come on: it's not like tracking line numbers in generated code is an unsolved problem. My own toy language (http://plausible.org/nasal) does this just fine, for example.

Erlang has reached prime time decades ago...

"Ready for prime time"? Erlang has been used by Ericsson in one of their flagship products for years, as well as by Motorola and T-Mobile. More recent examples are Amazon and Facebook. There are lots of people out there getting real work done with Erlang, many of whom say that doing it in anything else would be a major pain.

The line number issue may be an oversight, but in no way is it a flaw or something that's not there because the OTP team don't know how to do it. Concentrate on the real issues, such as the ones Joel Reymont is talking about.

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