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

[Thomas Kluyver]

I'd like to float the idea of a soft moratorium on big architectural
changes in the notebook between 4.0 and 5.0. That is, as 4.0 will mostly be
3.x's features on a new foundation, 5.0 would be mostly the 4.0's
foundations with added & polished features.

With 4.0, we'll have made two consecutive major releases where the headline
changes are architectural: the kernelspec machinery and changes for
language agnosticity in 3.0, and the Big Split in 4.0. We've done all of
this for good reasons, but I worry that we're becoming captivated by the
endless programmer dream of creating the perfect framework to solve all our
problems.

One of the principles to which we attribute the success of the project so
far is that we solve the problems in front of us and restructure when we
need to, rather than rushing into building grand architecture. I think that
we need a cycle to digest the architectural changes we've recently made
before we dive into another round. In particular, the talk of refactoring
all our frontend machinery concerns me. I don't want to stop us from
planning this, but I think it would be a mistake to try to do it for 5.0.

There are a lot of important features that we have been saying for some
time we will work on - like multi cell selection, find & replace across the
notebook, improved tab completion, and an HTML console interface. We've
deferred these tasks while we worked on the architecture, and it's starting
to be embarrassing that the interface is not moving forwards quicker. There
would also be less impetus for people to turn to competing projects if we
sanded some of the rough edges off the notebook interface.

On that note, I'd like us to try doing 'user Fridays', where we pretend
that we can't change the Jupyter/IPython code, and work on making
interesting notebooks, extensions, and other parts of the ecosystem. Every
time I work on such things, it highlights problems I wasn't aware of, or
rough edges I hadn't fully appreciated. Having a semi-official mechanism to
encourage us to do this in regular small chunks would be valuable in
keeping us focussed on users rather than just architecture.

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.

Thanks,
Thomas
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