On Sun, 10 Sep 2000, Alan Burlison wrote:
> Unfortunately the greatest volume on the various p6 sublists tends to be
> coming from the least experienced people. The comments based on common
> sense and long experience tend to be lost in the hubbub of uninformed
> noise.
I think the chaotic brainstorming on -language has been very necessary. We
need a forum that encourages new radical ideas. Sure, most of them
probably won't pan out or prove worthwhile, but I'm hopeful that there
will ultimately be a few new things in perl6 that grew out of this process
that a small team of core developers might never even have imagined.
Still, I certainly agree it's overwhelming, and I'm currently unsubscribed
because I just can't keep up.
> lot of people will inevitably be disappointed when their enthusiastic
> contributions are discarded, and I have seen absolutely no discussion of
> the process by which RFCs will be accepted or rejected (and saying
> 'Larry will do it' isn't good enough).
There has been a bit of this, actually, but it's generally been "lost in
the hubbub" :-). In my opinion, there's little point in developing a
formal procedure when many (most?0 of the RFCs won't need one (the
acceptance or rejection will be pretty obvious to everyone anyway) and
when the truly difficult-to-handle-ones will be difficult-to-handle no
matter how carefully you specify the handling procedure.
> The most difficult part of this process is sorting out the human
> issues, not the technical issues, but that is the very area that seems
> to have received least discussion.
I think, in part, that's because we're not quite at the point where we
have to face this head-on yet. But we're getting close, and I certainly
agree that the human issues will indeed be a very big hurdle, probably the
biggest hurdle facing the entire project.
--
Andy Dougherty [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dept. of Physics
Lafayette College, Easton PA 18042
