What a great way to get a lot of smart people to propose new ideas! What I would like to know is Paul's criteria for parsing these ideas. For example:
1. What makes this a good (bad) idea?
2. How to distinguish between language and framework (its been mentioned before).
3. Should they/can they be included/morphed into Arc, or is Arc kind of now too "set" (eg what sort of ideas can be included).
4. Or can cool ideas be added as libraries or something?
5. Some idea of the thought process that Paul goes through when reading submissions - that would be interesting to hear.For example I imagine overcoming the natural NIH bias must be challenging.
1. You can only accomplish what is possible.
2. Just because you can do it is no reason to do it.
3. What you do and how you do it depends upon your goal.
4. Context modifies nearly everything.
5. What is good or bad depends upon the ultimate value.
Knowing the relevant context and deciding the ultimate value is the challenge. The rest is easy by comparison. Both context and values are hardly ever discussed when it comes to programming projects. The discussions mostly reduce to "look at this cool thing I did - want to do - plan to do." The past is considered to be irrelevant and the future does not exist. Its only the eternal NOW and the excitement of an out of context fantasy. In such fertile soil are the seeds of almost universal failure with vast cost over runs, endless schedule extensions, and delivery of less than promised projects.
