Why do Erlang need modules
Interesting discussion popped up on erlang-questions mail list — “Why do we need modules at all?”. There’s also comments on hacker news.
The points are:
Why do we have to use module structure that reflects filesystem layout?
Let’s better have database with plain functions and query it by some associated metadata fields.
This leads me think about Smalltalk programming language and how it manages source code — runtime image is really a database with classes and associated methods.