On Sat, Apr 27, 2002 at 12:50:49PM +0200, Paul Johnson wrote: > > Here's another possibility. People trust Larry to get it right and > don't feel the need to weigh in with opinions.
I trust Larry. That's actually why I feel free to play the devil's advocate. I trust him to toss the dross and pick out the uncut diamonds and make something useful out of them. We've all seen how he can come into a discussion, pull the good bits out of various viewpoints and present us with a solution that is greater than the sum of the discussion. It occurs to me that it might be beneficial to lay a philosophical groundwork for the "Demosthenes Posts" and for the Perl 6 multilogue in general. Did I mention that tagmemics goes far beyond mere syntax? "Out of this originally linguistic inquiry have come the bases of tagmemic rhetoric, which posits composing as a problem-solving process and recenters the goal of rhetoric away from the narrower concerns of Aristotelian persuasion toward the broader goal of building bridges between rhetors who profess potentially conflicting worldviews, bridges that make possible both discovery of alternatives and volitional change." .... "From the tagmemic point of view, every rhetor's task is inevitably analogous to the kinds of challenges "alien" translators in a new cultural environment encounter: locating a point of entry into a particular language ambiguity, problem, or challenge that will provide a true bridge for nonthreatening exchange and that, therefore, might make possible meaningful change." [0] The individual ideas don't matter. It is the process that matters, the dialog that leads to deeper understanding of the problems, and to better solutions. It is the outcome that matters, a Perl that is better and cleaner and easier to use (yes, it really is easier), and is still Perl. Larry has said he'd like this to be the community's rewrite of Perl. How can it be that if we keep silent? The RFC's were the beginning, but we've had a course change of a few degrees since then which has taken us past interesting challenges no-one anticipated. So we talk, not in competition or from lack of trust but as an involved community. It's also fun. :) Allison [0] This is taken from Bruce L. Edwards: http://personal.bgsu.edu/~edwards/tags.html
