I am taking a week off of work because I am incredibly stressed and sad. I am extremely worried about the world, and a lot of the people in it that I care about. Writing always makes me feel better, and so I took a look at TRPL's bug tracker, thinking I'd work on it.

I kinda feel like TRPL is great, but there are a few key decisions that Carol and I made that maybe are limiting its potential. I think she put it best, TRPL kinda feels like "legacy spaghetti code." Small changes have impacts elsewhere, and then you're no longer doing a small thing but a huge thing so maybe let's just put it off.

I'm writing this to try and maybe shake some stuff loose. This isn't "The Big Rewrite" or even something I'm going to guarantee I'm going to finish. It's just a form of therapy, that maybe will turn into something more real someday.

So what's different?

Because TRPL is "the official book" it has a few obligations, in my mind:

• We cannot pick ecosystem favorites. Best to not use the ecosystem at all.
• We have to be reasonably thorough. If something isn't in the book, people may not know that it exists at all.
• We can't assume that people have programmed in any given language before.
• Forward references should be minimal.

Additionally, I find it hard to write with examples, because I tend to learn in a more abstract way. So there's a lot of foo and bar and such. We introduced "project chapters" to try and combat this, but I think in some ways they're the strongest and weakest parts of the book entirely.

So this ... whatever it is, is taking a slightly different approach:

• I will cover what I want to, and sometimes gloss over things. Not afraid to say "we'll talk about this later."
• I will use gold-standard ecosystem crates when it makes sense. Serde is pretty much the package for 99% of serialization needs. I should be able to use it.
• I want to focus on "real" programs. They may be toy variations, but they should be useful, real-ish things.
• Put in exercises for people to practice with.

We'll see how this goes. I reserve the right to stop, never finish, whatever. I would appreciate comments, so I've turned on commenting. We'll just see how it goes.