On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 7:27 PM, Stavros Macrakis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Thank you for the pointer to your paper "Getting Started with Lattice > Graphics" -- it looks very useful. > > I think we're talking past each other on the question of the semantics > of formula operators, and it's probably not productive to continue. I > would guess that the underlying issue is that we come from different > communities, and so have different background assumptions. Perhaps > it's the old MIT vs New Jersey story > (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html) -- after all, S/R does > come out of the Bell Labs community, and I was in the MIT Lisp > community many decades ago....
Thanks for the link; it was an interesting read. I can certainly identify with the worse-is-better style. I believe "the right thing" is essentially what Eric Raymond calls the Cathedral style, although he contrasts it with something different. One thought that pops into my mind is that "the right thing" approach more or less implies design by committee, which while important for standardization work, (1) rarely produces useful innovation, and (2) raises the barrier to entry for new developers. Since new developers are essential for Free Software projects to thrive, the worse-is-better approach seems ideal for them. -Deepayan P.S. I liked the bit about "losers" :-) ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
