Levente Uzonyi-2 wrote:
> 
> IMHO it doesn't matter if it's crap or not. What you should consider is:
> - how widely is the API used?
> 

While this is practical and a great way to prioritize, I ultimately want a
system that is clean and beautiful down as close to the metal as possible.
In the past, when I've dug deeper (Morphic, VM, etc.), I got smacked by
ugly, hard to understand code and broken processes. Usually, just to figure
out what the heck is going on I have to spend time refactoring and cleaning
before I can do my work. And at ESUG, I got the same feedback. For instance,
when Morphic came up, I realized that we all end up reimplementing from the
ground up (custom text morph, layout hacks) because it's so brittle. I
talked to people all over the world waiting with great ideas, because they
were bitten by the ugliness in the depths of the code. Once the necessary
pain is done, I think many will step up and produce amazing things, but not
if the cleaning and restructuring stops.

For me to be confident and productive, I need to know that wherever I go,
even if it's not very often, I will be at home and empowered to bend the
system to my ends. For me, the releases are like OS releases with a
super-human pace, which I enjoy and appreciate. That having been said, I
have projects still using 1.2, and spend a lot of time keeping outside
projects up to date as I upgrade. If that's the price for the system we all
dream of, so be it.


Levente Uzonyi-2 wrote:
> 
> - how easy is it to implement a (partially) backwards compatible API?
> 
In some cases, but how about file handling? 
  "FileDirectory extensionFor: aDirectoryEntryFile name" vs. "anFSReference
extension"
Someone please cryogenically freeze me until the former is eradicated from
the image. It hurts and offends me.

My 2c,
Sean

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