On 2-Nov-08, at 12:40 PM, Mitchell Wand wrote: > I would very much like to hear whether any others feel that this is > a perceived advantage for supporters of the language described by > the R6RS.
I agree with Will. I know some "real Schemers" who did not participate in the R6RS process because they did not want to "spoil the party" for those pushing for R6RS. My feeling is that the R6RS electorate contains proportionately more pro R6RS people than the general Scheme community. So the process becomes biased if you make it easier for them to vote. Moreover people who did not vote on R6RS may feel excluded from the community you want to poll because automatically including the R6RS electorate gives the appearance that this community is the one interested in R6RS. Lets aim to be inclusive! I also like Will's suggestion to allow people to register and to vote at the same time (on one form). This will simplify the voting process, for the voters at least, and hopefully attract a broader participation. Beside these changes to the voting process, I would like to see some changes to the organization of the Scheme standardization committees and their duties. The RnRS standards with n<=5 evolved from committee work under the unanimous consent rule. Even though there were many RnRS authors, the language avoided acquiring the inconsistencies that are typical of "committee designed languages" (for more on this see Paul Graham's essay "Five Questions about Language Design" http://www.paulgraham.com/langdes.html). These previous Scheme standards were true to Scheme's principal design philosophy that "Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, ...". The R6RS was designed by a smaller committee yet it suffers from several inconsistencies and unwarranted bloat. To avoid this in the next design iteration I believe the committee members must agree from the start on the design philosophy and the nature of changes which are sought. There may be more than one way to achieve this. I propose that the steering committee should take on a more active role in the design process and ensure that the fundamental features of Scheme, if you wish its soul, is preserved. I see the editors committee as implementors of the design goals and constraints set forth by the steering committee. There must be frequent and regular interaction between the steering committee and the editors committee. As I understand it such a change in the committees' organization is possible since once it is elected the steering committee can change the charter. However it is not clear to me that the current steering committee election process is appropriate because it does not include any measures to promote the election of a committee that works well together. The single transferable vote mechanism, with which I have no experience, appears to promote proportional representation. This is not the most important property to optimize. A steering committee with divergent opinions would be a disaster, yet nothing in the election process guards against it. For this reason I believe that the electorate should not vote for individual members of the steering committee. Instead, nominees should be given some time to get to know the other nominees and to form coalitions with the nominees they would like to work with. Once this is done the electorate can place their vote for one of the coalitions, and the one with the most votes gets elected. This procedure will yield a much more effective committee. Moreover the electorate will have a much clearer idea of what their vote represents. It also reduces the likelihood that members of the committee will resign due to friction with the other members. Marc _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
