On Sun, 2009-02-22 at 11:28 -0500, Mitchell Wand wrote: > IIRC, we are in the waning hours of the voting period for the Steering > Committee who will have the responsibility of guiding Scheme into the > next stage of its existence. > > And all anybody wants to talk about is case-sensitivity?!?
There are several things going on there. First, no - there has been conversation about topics more central to SC duties, such as voting rules for making changes. If you look at those, I think you'll see that they mostly failed to shed much light. For example, there was chat about super-majority voting rules. Do they protect minority opinions? Do they lead to hijacking by minority groups? Only, look at how ungrounded that chat is: *what* minority groups are we talking about here? And, in the end, what difference do the rules make to someone who wants to know if their favorite feature or change or whatever has a chance of making it into R7? We have no good basis to answer questions like that - we're stuck with abstractions about voting system in general. Whatever it is that we're talking about in those threads it's not clear that we're talking about the future of Scheme. But, wait - isn't the "future of Scheme" pretty much the overarching concern here? Those conversations lack lasting appeal because it's not clear they are about anything meaningful and "on topic" if the topic is the future of Scheme. ------------------------- Second: Case (in)sensitivity at least is a concrete topic - grounded in the technical details of the language. And it's an interesting concrete topic because of the historic change. So, it's a topic where people get to talk about things like the importance of upwards compatibility, about the impact of a design detail on implementation complexity, about the importance of supporting non-english users and processing non-english data, about the design process of R6, and about the possible design process going forward. ------------------------- Third: I think you ought to "take away" from the discussion about case is that, evidently, a great deal of the community interest in direct participation in the deliberative process that produces new or revised language in the standard. Dillinger said it well a few messages back: Rationales were obscured in R6 and the thing was plunked down for basically an all-or-nothing, thumbs-up-or-down. That's a formula for generating resentment. Oh, sure, there was a public discussion period. My sense of it was that it was very effective at cleaning up a lot of nits and typos but... On the topic of any of the larger, controversial changes, the discussion period was not very effective. It felt to me like a lot of cases of strong arguments being offered against some of the R6 ways only to get back responses that said little more than "We don't think that's important," or "We don't see it that way, sorry, not gonna happen." In some cases, my sense was that the message from the editors was really "Perhaps there is a point there or not but the fact is we worked really hard on this and we just want to finish up now." That is why I suggested in an earlier (ignored) message a radical reinvention of the R7 process in which, before we try to figure out even how to ratify a draft, we first figure out how better to facilitate a meaningful, more formal design conversation with more of the community members. ----------------------------- Finally, the revised report series is an economically significant object. For people with their names on it, it's a valuable addition to a CV. For a larger audience, it's a touchstone against implementations and a standard reference item to list on the "skills" section of a resume. It's also a document that can be referred to in conversations with other language design efforts. Well, the Scheme community has an economic crisis, if you ask me. It comes down to it being an institutional and economic privilege of a very few to determine the contents of the Report, even though economic interest in the the report and its economic impact is much larger than that. This is taxation with representation. It's tyranny, of a sort. The result is less a "Report" and more a "Proclamation". -------------------------------------- The original choice of title - "Report" - is suggestive. It suggests that a lot of related work was going on in various places, by various people, all of whom recognized one another as all working "on Scheme". There were things they shared in common, areas where their interests diverged. It was believed to be valuable between them and as their collective face to the world to find (or make up) a set of essential elements upon which they could agree. The statement of such agreement is an account of what the community was doing - a "Report" - not a sanctified "Standard" (until IEEE happened). Not a "Proclamation" by an Authority. The community is quite a bit larger now and comes from a vastly more diverse economic and institutional place. Yet the "Report" does not reflect this diversity and work on the report (by anyone) tends to accrue benefits mainly for a few. As things stand right now - looking at various implementations, and diverging opinions, and all of that - an honest R7 *could* very well be one that winds up being subtitled: "Five similar languages, all called Scheme." (With some suitable constant substituted for "Five".) Perhaps it would have an appendix on "Best Portable Practices". Or, perhaps if we start off on a process that *can* have that outcome, we'll actually discover consensus and have a single-language R7 after all - but one more people are happier about. And, again: money is money. Looking at myself and looking around the virtual room here I keep thinking that we would see better work, better focus, and better outcome if more of us were getting paid to play. The office of the Steering Committee seems to me the proper place in the existing order to begin to think about that and do something about it. -t _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
