On 30/12/2008, at 9:51 AM, Noah Slater wrote:
I can see it from both angles, of course we should be discussing
things on
technical merit and not some fluffy concept of who's better at
predicting
things. On the other hand, Damien has a significant head-start on us
all with
CouchDB and Lotus Notes before it, so if I was going to trust
anyone's intuition
it would be his.
Surely design is better than intuition?
There are general principles at work here, about enabling
extensibility and presuming that we cannot predict the future. A
design that enables extensibility, and allows for unanticipated uses
and emergent properties, is superior to a design that is deliberately
made brittle for expedient reasons, backed-up by an assertion that a
guiding hand knows how this will evolve and be used for all time.
It's easy to get this right and make everything simpler to use (by
leveraging fundamental congnitive expectations such as name identity)
and extensible. So far I haven't seen any good technical argument why
either name identity (_id/_rev everywhere), or _meta, shouldn't be
adopted.
Antony Blakey
-------------
CTO, Linkuistics Pty Ltd
Ph: 0438 840 787
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