Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: user-friendly hash formats, redux

[Julian Seward]

> On Sunday 05 December 2004 21:26, graydon hoare wrote:
>
> I used to worry a lot about this. it was a hard thing for me to swallow
> any evidence that I wasn't working on The One True VC System. but as
> time passed, I have come to accept that this space is big enough for an
> ecology of competitors. that the factors will shift from time to time,
> person to person, and project to project, to favour one or the other.

You may be in a better situation than you think you are.  Premature
success is in a way a curse, because it makes it much more difficult to
make conceptual-level design changes without inconveniencing a large
number of users.

There's an interesting retrospective on 15 years of development of
Haskell (a very remarkable programming language, imo) at 
   http://research.microsoft.com/
     ~simonpj/papers/haskell-retrospective/HaskellRetrospective.ppt

One of the observations is that (Slide 7) "A smallish, rather pointy-
header user-base makes Haskell nimble.  Haskell has evolved rapidly and
continues to do so.  Motto: avoid success at all costs".  The author
is half-serious.

Another example ... I wish bzip2 had not become so popular so
fast.  The .bz2 file format is stupidly overcomplicated and messy,
but by the time I realised how to make it a lot cleaner, it was 
already in widespread use.

So .. take the time to explore the design space properly and come
up with a really excellent design.  Once Monotone catches on big time,
you will no longer have that luxury.

J