Paul Russell wrote:
[snip]
So, let me know what you think! Am I mad? Is this a bad/good idea? What have I missed? Is this something we should take further, or just a distraction?
Paul,
first of all, I thank you deeply for having taken the time to write this, there is a lot of thinking and you can tell, there is a lot of good thinking and elegant design.. there is only one problem:
YAGNI
You are proposing design abstractions to solve problems I don't feel we have. Branching pipelines? you gotta be kidding. block++? we can't even get the real one implemented!
We some problems on the table, real, painful... and you propose solutions to things that nobody really think they are a problem. Not me at least. I think you will add a huge burden of abstraction for very little functional benefit. I might entirely wrong, but it feels like a 2.0 syndrome: there is no incrementality and no plan to get there, no requirements, just a whiteboard cleanup of all the little compromises that have been made over time... and the goal is elegance, not simplicity.
Been there, done that. I'm sorry, it doesn't work, don't count me in, I'm interested in solving real problems in the simplest possible way, even if they end up feeling hacky at times.
The last thing that cocoon needs is a redesign.
-- Stefano.
