[Appsmith]

Very good points!

I totally agree that it suffers from premature or even wrong abstractions. I guess it's to be expected because it hasn't had enough time to refine those yet -- it takes years! But the issue is that once it's out in production maintaining backward compatibility becomes top priority and hinders the refinement process.

[PaulHoule]

I've had a very long term project (first thought about it in 2004) of developing workflow-based systems with classifiers such as

  * an application tracking system for jobs I might want to apply to
  * a smart RSS reader that picks out the top articles from a 3000 article/day feed
  * a "bookmark manager", "web crawler" and "personal agent" that can import image galleries on a large scale and let me rate and tag them
  * a tool I'm using to sort through 400 notes from a friend's Evernote notebook

These have been badly underengineered but highly effective. Talking about my ATS got me a job at an AI startup on my first interview. The trainer for the RSS reader is a crude set of python scripts but it makes a great model every time and is easy to make simple changes to.

Over time though I've learned a lot about the problem so the last two are running out of the same codebase and I'm probably going to get the RSS reader running in the same system. It took me literally years though to design components that were worth reusing.

[Appsmith]

Cool projects!

And we're on the same page as to the time it takes!