Re: questioning fairness/purpose of Scheme Implementors Workshop

[Jeff Dalton <jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk>]

KMP's concerns are valid.  However, workshops are often organized
on a similar basis, without much, if any, complaint.

  Attendance will be by invitation only.  Potential attendees must submit a
  position paper as outlined below.

That much, at least, seems fairly typical of the rules for
"workshops".

It might be reasonable to object to that as well, but what I'm
wondering is whether KMP is objecting to that or only to the
restriction to implementors (or other "right people", narrowly
defined).

In any case, why not judge by the quality of the position papers
without saying it's necessarily restricted to "major implementors"?

  ... The purpose of this
  workshop is to bring together the major implementors of Scheme in
  order to review the state of various Scheme implementations and to
  assess alternatives for the continued development of Scheme.

I've actually implemented Scheme, more than once, but I'm not a
"major implementor".  I'm not strongly inclined to go to the
workshop in any case, for reasons not very relevant here.
But I would find it a bit much if, regardless of the quality
of my position paper, I were excluded because I was not a "major"
implementor.

Also, KMP's points based on the Common Lisp experience should be taken
very seriously, if this workshop is meant to have any impact on the
Scheme definition.

-- jeff