[development] Freezing the Drupal API

[Richard Archer]

At 7:01 PM -0600 15/5/06, Greg Knaddison - GVS wrote:

>Well, that is nice.  But code is gold.  Talk is silver. And talk of
>talk must be made of an even lesser metal.

That's a quaint mantra.

Code can be gold but unless you perform sufficient analysis
and design before coding, the code is likely to be something
much less valuable than gold.

What I see in Drupal is lots of code that was hacked together
as a proof-of-concept then polished up a bit and committed.

The inconsistencies in the Drupal API reflect this approach
to development.

At first glance the Drupal code looks very nice, but when you
delve deeper you find that the coupling of the code is quite
high. This is because the API is seen as secondary to the
evolution of the code.

What I want to do is get a group of people together to work
on developing a much more rigid and robust API so that the
code can be incrementally improved without impacting on
contrib and custom modules.

 ...R.