> So far, the Scheme Topics
> mailing lists seem to have been a fruitful experiment in bringing people
> together to discuss specific ideas with concrete, mature code and
> proposals as their goal.

The lists have had excellent signal-to-noise ratio so far.

We may be reaching the limit of how many projects we can take on. Does
anyone else feel this way? In that case no communication structure will
help. We do a lot of high-quality work with few people but the limit
comes up at some point. And with close to a year of designing more and
more ambitious projects, it's only natural that it would finally happen.
I've continually felt during the past few weeks that I just can't think
and type faster no matter how the work is organized.

How to recruit more people of the kind we have would be useful to know.
Then it likely wouldn't be a problem to address more topics.

> I should mention that quite a few of the SRFIs that have been
> withdrawn were withdrawn because of follow-on SRFIs that were intended to
> replace them, and others were part of the R6RS process, whose authors
> announced at the beginning that they would be withdrawing all the SRFIs
> they introduced once the discussions were complete.  Many of the R6RS
> editors' SRFIs became part of R6RS, which means that that effort was surely
> not wasted.

Agreed. I don't think withdrawn SRFIs are a bad sign; they are neutral.
Withdrawing one's own document is a sign of honesty and integrity; part
of the point of SRFI is to explore designs, and complex problems don't
always solved right the first time.

I also don't think the number of SRFIs (175) is anywhere near the
reasonable limit. We could have 300 of them and it wouldn't be a
problem. Scheme needs to address a lot of problem domains and more
documents is a sign of more problems being addressed. It's a natural
consequence of growth.