[IPython-dev] Proposal: soft moratorium on re-architecting for 5.0

[Chris Colbert]

I have to side firmly with Fernando on this one. After ripping apart the
notebook code base over the last few days, it's become clear that things
need change measurably if we are going to move forward with a platform that
is both maintainable and customizable.  There is quite a bit of technical
debt in there, and that bill is coming due. My team and cohorts are ready,
willing, and able to tackle this problem (as Fernando mentioned, we've
already started), and I think it would be a strategic mistake to shut the
door on the momentum we've been building over the last several months.

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 7:45 PM, Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The moratorium I propose would be left to our judgement to implement -
>> it's a principle rather than a rule. I'd make an exception for the
>> conversion to Typescript, because Matthias has already spent significant
>> time on that, and I know he's champing at the bit to finish it. Widgets
>> would be exempt, because we've made it very clear that they're liable to
>> change significantly, and they shouldn't much affect development of the
>> notebook itself.
>
>
> While I hear very much the spirit of what you are saying, and I certainly
> think that we can't lose sight that the *only* thing that ultimately
> matters is whether we serve our users well or not, there's a big piece that
> is already burning under us that probably can't wait.  In fact, at the last
> dev meeting, Jason already posted his new draft code in this direction:
>
> https://github.com/jasongrout/phosphor-notebook
>
> and this is part of the reason why Matthias has been working on the
> Typescript conversion, and also one of the big bottleneck points: we know
> that multiple folks want to customize the notebook UI more heavily, and in
> its current incarnation, that's very, very difficult. And for multiple
> teams working in different directions, probably impractical/impossible at
> the end of the day.
>
> The current Notebook is, in a certain sense, where the core IPython code
> was sometime in the 0.9-0.10 period: highly functional, yet highly
> monolithic and very difficult to change, adapt or extend.  And I really
> think that, just as much as eventually we had to bite that bullet, and how
> we benefitted from doing so at the time, we have to do the UI restructuring
> now.
>
> I really don't see how, right now, multiple folks are going to be able to
> simultaneously work on the notebook codebase being as monolithic as it is.
>
> So yes, I do hear you, and I think it's important that we don't lose sight
> of the value for our users.  We can't become a project that only looks at
> its own development needs and never produces features that actually matter
> to its users.  That's more or less what Python did with Python 3, and we
> all know how that went...
>
> But I do think that we've accrued sufficient technical debt with the
> codebase of the notebook, and we have enough pressure *already at our
> doorstep* from multiple fronts regarding the need to implement many
> different types of tools and ideas atop the web frontend, that we need to
> open that up.
>
> What I hope is that over the next few days at Scipy, when most of you
> (sadly without me) have a chance to meet face to face, you'll be able to
> hatch a plan to do this in a way that doesn't lose track of the important
> goals:
>
> - do a minimal refactoring that preserves today's functionality, even if
> there's perhaps a small loss in polish on first release.
>
> - get a more decoupled codebase that will allow us to build the various
> pieces we need.
>
> But I honestly don't see the current notebook codebase supporting the
> pressure we have already on it without a refactoring right away, precisely
> so that we can let more folks build new functionality...
>
> Cheers,
>
> f
>
> --
> Fernando Perez (@fperez_org; http://fperez.org)
> fperez.net-at-gmail: mailing lists only (I ignore this when swamped!)
> fernando.perez-at-berkeley: contact me here for any direct mail
>
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