[bjourne]

This is an all-time classic, but, sadly, most HN commenters just don't "get it". Perhaps because they have no experience with the Erlang VM so they don't understand Joe's premises The Erlang VM is best described as a dynamic process manager and a "function" is just a callstack template. You want to fix a bug in your executing function without stopping it? Sure, no problem. Just reload the function and have the VM seamlessly upgrade the callstack to the new template. Since data is immutable it mostly just works. Now since functions forms the basic unit of work in Erlang modules are kind of irrelevant. Recompiling a module is the same as recompiling every function in the module. Hence, what use does the abstraction serve? The proliferation of "utils" or "misc" modules in not only Erlang but many other languages supports his point.

Btw, the more experienced I've gotten the more I've found that organizing code is mostly pointless. A 5000-line source file (e.g., module) isn't necessarily worse than five 1000-line files.

[skydhash]

It's all related to naming. You can refer to a symbol with auth/guard/token/authenticate or auth_guard_token_authenticate, and what matters is the amount of characters you type sometimes. Also you can have encapsulation with the first option.

Smalltalk have the same live experience, but do have modules, because it makes editing easier and encapsulation is nice for readability and clarity.

[bjourne]

No, neither Smalltalk nor any of the Lisp environments that purport to support hot code reloading have the same facilities the Erlang VM has.

[skydhash]

Concurrency and tasks supervision is orthogonal to modules/packages.

[igouy]

Is a 5,000-line function worse than 500 10-line functions?

(Locality of reference.)