I mean, yes? OTP is a framework—a paradigm for writing your code in, essentially—but it's an optional one. That's why it's split out from Erlang itself. You can write Erlang however you like. Most people choose to write it in the OTP paradigm. But sometimes that's not the best choice (e.g. the type of code that leex/yecc generates, does not obey OTP principles, nor would it help it in any way if it did.)

Fair point. Big frameworks and dogma go hand in hand, and I suppose Erlang without OTP is at least as practical as any other language.

I wonder though if Erlang might have been a footnote in programming history if it weren't for the mindshare that OTP generated. "Simple functional language" is attractive, but "simple functional language with world-class platform" turned out to be a game-changer.

> I wonder though if Erlang might have been a footnote in programming history if it weren't for the mindshare that OTP generated.

It absolutely would be. There's plenty of "simple FP languages" out there. OTP is very definitely the main selling point of Erlang, and nowadays of Elixir as well.

I think it's more accurate to say that OTP's dogma comes specifically from it having chased down pragmatism to a fault, to the point where whether or not OTP's doing something is a reasonably-reliable indicator of whether or not that something is a good idea (at least for Erlang's typical use cases) and therefore arguably warrants the dogmatism.

That's a good way to put it. I think we're in agreement that dogma wasn't avoided in this case.