Re: questioning fairness/purpose of Scheme Implementors Workshop

["John D. Ramsdell" <ramsdell@linus.mitre.org>]

Kent writes:

> Scheme is a language, not an implementation.  ....

and then goes on to say that it's not right to exclude users at the
Scheme Implementors Workshop. 

IMHO, if the purpose of the meeting is to design a language, I think
the meeting will fail for two reasons.  First, I agree with Kent that
people representing users should be at a language design meeting.
Second, the outstanding issue in language standardization is to
construct a new standardization process.  There already are plenty of
good design proposals--we lack a procedure for choosing among them.

However, I strongly suspect the purpose of the workshop is not to do
language design or solve the Scheme's political problems.  Rather, it
is to exchange ideas on implementing various proposals.  I hope it
will lead to implementations which support multiple solutions to one
problem.  For example, with modules, one implementation could provide
two module systems from which to choose.  I hope that the ultimate
result of the workshop will be to give users more choices.  I am
perfectly happy to be excluded from such a workshop.

Let the flowers bloom,

John

An attempt at humor for Dilbert readers: If the workshop is aimed at
language standardization, it should be renamed to be the Scheme
Implementors Death Spiral Workshop. (See the strip from 2/29/96.)

Dilbert comics delayed by a week are available at:

	<url:http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/>