On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 7:39 PM, Jake Mannix <jake.man...@gmail.com> wrote: > I will start playing around with Anthony's github-based stuff, and > see where a patch can be made. The question is where it would > go? It's a fully functioning project already over on its own.
I suppose that's my question too -- what is being fixed by a move? The point about integrating with the ML community by having a 'LISP-speaking' module, to be friendlier, is a good one. It does call into question the Mahout identity -- is it for tinkering with in a lab to explore new algorithms (for which Clojure/LISP makes sense)? or is it for engineers and production systems at scale -- where Hadoop/Java is the lingua franca? Yeah, this is not just another language, but for a somewhat different audience. Maybe "both" is nice. Before version 1.0 I think it can be harmful to let the project remit range too broadly. We all know how open-source goes. It's for-fun, spare-time. It's easy to start things and hard to finish them. I'm just getting concerned we end up with 10 half-finished modules rather than 5 finished ones. I don't have reason to believe this module would be orphaned; this is tilting at windmils. It's just a general concern raised by early expansion. After the foundation we have now is solid -- naturally, careful expansion is a next step. Do I hear consensus to think about this post-1.0, post TLP, post book? and continue working together to see where the projects go? (There's some value to staying separate -- forces you to not integrate the code in cheap and tangled ways -- have to proceed through public APIs.) Or is there a significant synergy from tight integration, which warrants combining projects right now? I don't want to make too much hay over this one question as much as bring up the larger issue. I wouldn't scream if Clojure landed in the repo.
