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It would be nice to know the future, although not knowing the future is what allows it to unfold the way it chooses to. History will show that.
Anyway, while at #COMMONS17, something I briefly considered for the 2012 launch of Inuendo came up - the future. You see, Inuendo is a time continuum that knows everything about the past and present, but nothing about the future. But there's some things about the future we may already know...such as planned price increases. While they could be cancelled, they're very likely to happen.
Everything in Inuendo is rooted in its Moment. But what if that Moment was in the future? One of Inuendo's greatest assets is its forensic value down to the "piece of information" level. Allowing a future Moment would fly in the face of that. Perhaps Sally in the Fargo office didn't actually enter a new unit price on the morning of 10/14/2017, but we’d want the same result as if she had...when that morning actually arrives.
Useful? Perhaps. But is the ability to proactively store future information with an "effective Moment" worth the price of losing the true forensic value that Inuendo's design provides? Plus plotting future data might necessitate the instantiation of future Entities. Now it’s getting “heavy”. Because putting a future creation time stamp on an Entity means that it exists, but it doesn’t exist…yet . And what if the future doesn’t unfold the way we thought? Doc Brown once said, “Your future hasn’t been written yet…no one’s has”. How would we handle that?
Yet it’s inevitable that someone will fork Inuendo and modify the STDENTOUT service program to allow future history to be altered. I’ll be presented with a pull request…and the temporal and ethical dilemma that accompanies it. In all honesty, I have no idea how I’ll respond, because that hasn’t been written yet either.
I'd appreciate your thoughts. #Inuendo #OpenSource #IBMiOSS