I think it is a great idea to encourage experimentation and evolution of the fileformat/featureset.
My feeling is that Martin probably doesn't have the bandwidth to play any significant BDFL-type role commenting on various proposals or shepherding towards consensus. So the beancount family is probably better served with something a bit more free-form. I could see value in a centralised repository where alt-beancounts could post "hey, here's what I'm trying out", a bit like we've seen with the various flavours of markdown over the years which also don't have a BDFL but have evolved in a bit more chaotic fashion. I think the biggest value-add at the moment would simply be some kind of unique number for each change from vanilla-beancount so people could talk about "change #12 in limabean is easier to use but less powerful than the similar change #26 in prolog-bean" and provide a focus for discussions like RFCs do. I can't imagine trying to enforce too much structure on either the document or the process would be very useful, simply because I imagine most people writing alt-beancounts aren't terribly invested in writing long documents in prescribed formats for what is still largely a personal project. But if you have more lightweight examples from smaller projects (i.e. not rust or python which understandably have rigorous processes) it might help generate more ideas. On Thursday, February 26, 2026 at 11:25:49 AM UTC+10:30 Simon Guest wrote: > The Beancount developer landscape seems to be thriving at the moment with > several recent announcements about new implementations. This is certainly > exciting, and it's great to see such creativity. > > Martin has made a huge contribution to the plain text accounting > community, both with the very well designed original Beancount system which > we all love, and also the extensive documentation and test suite. Thank > you indeed! These were certainly enablers for my own limabean > <https://github.com/tesujimath/limabean>. > > And so now times are changing, and Beancount is in some ways being > liberated from its Python origins. We are seeing work in Rust, Zig, > Clojure, and who knows what to come. Exciting times indeed! But how will > we avoid fragmentation? > > It is clear that in future we will have multiple implementations of > Beancount-like systems. That is not what I am concerned about. My > concerns are: > > 1. Preserving a common file format > > 2. Preserving common core behaviour > > I expect and celebrate a varied approach to user interface (Beancount > Query Language, Fava, or Fava-like GUI, Clojure, whatever else). This is a > fruitful area for exploration. So too, the plugin ecosystem will surely > diverge. I agree with Moritz, the author of TurboBean > <https://github.com/themoritz/turbobean> (cool project!) that you > wouldn't want to embed a Python interpreter just for plugins if you don't > already need it. And with limabean I am exploring the idea of not needing > plugins at all. > > It should be easy for users to try out different implementations, which > requires (1) and (2) above, and perhaps more. > > The vNext document <https://beancount.github.io/docs/beancount_v3.html> > has some interesting ideas, which explains TurboBean diverging with a new > approach to inventory. Is this the future? I would like to know, as I > would then have to follow along with limabean! > > What I would really like to see is some kind of RFC process, like which is > used for evolution of the Rust language and ecosystem. I hope that Martin > would like to be the BDFL for some kind of RFC-like process which unifies > all these parallel developments, in terms of defining core behaviour, > *especially > where this differs from OG Beancount* (in fact, probably only where it > differs). > > In summary, I think we should embrace and celebrate the current divergence > of implementation work in the Beancount ecosystem, but take some steps to > mitigate the otherwise inevitable fragmentation. > > All comments welcome! > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/3a441c4c-5e54-4ef0-bc6d-39f7bb683923n%40googlegroups.com.
