Then I saw Tom Preston-Werner's involvement and my interest level raised considerably. I'm still not sure if there's a market for this per se, but the bone-fides of the dev team is certainly a good sign.
Redwood started as an experiment, and we'll see where it goes, but my intuition is that it will fill a need that many React developers currently have (namely: the lack of integrated solutions to all the technologies available in the ecosystem). It's certainly something that I want!
Good luck to you guys.
I honestly will never understand why people say things like this. As though there's no room for progress. As though there aren't alternatives that may or may not be better. Imagine if the folks building React thought "ya know, we got Angular, so why are we doing this?"... Or any of the many, many other similar scenarios. It's how we make progress.
I would have agreed with you already until I read the above sentence. Having a famous programmer isn't really a great reason or argument to adopt yet another N + 1 web frameworks. Sure, some have reasons to exist but appealing to authority is hardly any valid reason here.
Even that aside, if everyone were to adopt this by the time it reaches v1.0, someone will complain via writing a Medium blog-post and introduce another web framework on top of Redwood or introduce some other improvement for Redwood but as a fork of the project rather than a contribution back to Redwood.
Here we go again.
It's about competence.
Would you not have increased confidence in an NBA team after hearing Stephen Curry had joined it after the previous season? I think you'd be highly irrational not to.
If you’ve got someone with a particular skill set joining your project, that’s great that you’ve got strong, additional perspective in that domain. However, this isn’t a sixty minute game, and no one is getting paid millions to hit a game winning shot. This is open source software.
I hope as an industry we learn to drop the theatrics and recognize our unique way of bringing value to whichever projects we contribute to.
Well, he made Gravatar, Jekyll, TOML and quite a few other open source things I've used.
Accuse me of "theatrics" if you like, but I am in fact inclined to check out projects made by people who have made other things I like. I also read books written by people who have written other books I like. I watch movies with directors and actors from other movies I like, too!
It's not a sure-fire guarantee I'll like the next thing but odds are considerably improved. Not updating my priors when learning of their involvement would be ridiculous.