I had a lovely conversation with the #NWB devs yesterday. I messaged them cryptically like "hey can we talk about the history of this thing and the design decisions and constraints" and they were refreshingly candid and willing to engage with such a vague and open ended question. Formats and standards are always 100 times as complicated as they appear, and this one is this particularly heady mixture of neuroscientists riffing on something, computer scientists coming in later to be like "OK nice but let's make that work" and about a million rounds of historical baggage and iteration.
I freaking love finding ppl who care about what they do enough to hold it at arms length for a second to evaluate its history and the constraints it navigates. Good people, I like em.
