A liitle note on the side felix (23 Jun 2004 23:44 UTC)
Re: A liitle note on the side Bradd W. Szonye (24 Jun 2004 00:14 UTC)
Re: A liitle note on the side Alex Shinn (24 Jun 2004 03:10 UTC)
Re: A liitle note on the side Bradd W. Szonye (24 Jun 2004 03:55 UTC)
Re: A liitle note on the side Jens Axel Søgaard (24 Jun 2004 05:04 UTC)
Re: A liitle note on the side Bradd W. Szonye (24 Jun 2004 05:07 UTC)
Re: A liitle note on the side Felix Winkelmann (24 Jun 2004 05:19 UTC)
Re: A liitle note on the side campbell@xxxxxx (24 Jun 2004 16:56 UTC)
Re: A liitle note on the side Bradd W. Szonye (24 Jun 2004 18:47 UTC)
Re: A liitle note on the side campbell@xxxxxx (24 Jun 2004 04:19 UTC)
Re: A liitle note on the side Alex Shinn (24 Jun 2004 05:07 UTC)
Re: A liitle note on the side campbell@xxxxxx (24 Jun 2004 01:40 UTC)

A liitle note on the side felix 23 Jun 2004 23:50 UTC

There seems to be a tendency in this mailing list that I find
somewhat distasteful:

SRFI-55 is a tiny little thing, a small device to make
it straightforward to access things provided by libraries,
or other forms of externally available extensions, in this
specific case SRFIs.
Several Scheme implementations (the majority of the serious
ones, aynway) already provide such a device, so this SRFI is
just trying to standardize common practice.

Now, it seems that some people take this as an opportunity
to make big statements about million line programs and the
dangers to the future of Scheme. This is ridiculuous.

Moreover, there appears now to exist a common consent
among these people that I'm just an ignorant, clueless
little jerk who doesn't know what he's talking about.
But I can live with that.

So to you guys which have already zeroed in on me, mindlessly
repeating the mantras "you don't understand it!", "you
are fracturing the Scheme world!" and "you just want to
force your own taste on us!". I heard it. I heard it
now several times. It's ok. I registered it.
You should have come to the conclusion by now that I can't
be intimidated by this style of meta-argument, especially since
each and every of these statements is wrong.

Pragmatism and ease of use is important to me, and common
practice is important to me as well, because it tells
me that Scheme implementors and actual Scheme programmers,
who actually produce code, seem to prefer the REQUIREish
form (an indication of which is that most Schemes already
have some sort of REQUIRE, with minor syntactic differences).

The wonderful thing about the SRFI process is that it allows
variety, where different designs can compete by "letting the
market decide" (so to speak), i.e. one can look how well
a SRFI gets accepted or not accepted. I don't think finalized SRFIs
are standards as such, I think David Rush called it "feeder process"
for real standardization (like R6RS, which is currently forming).

So if you don't like it, just ignore it.

Remember: There is no "danger" in REQUIRE-EXTENSION.

cheers,
felix