Thanks for the feedback, Wolf! Good to hear from another regular. > Weasel words, as the Wikipedians say. You're right. I chose my words poorly. > I don’t believe that this is a “general sentiment”. General sentiment by many. Not by all. Why do people keep saying I claim to represent a consensus of schemers? Scheme rarely has a consensus on anything. > I won’t try to be > a barometer of public opinion, but I will say that the opposition to > SRFI has been from a small but vocal minority. I haven't seen wholesale opposition to SRFI from any serious schemer. The opposition is "please don't stuff every idea into SRFI", not "the SRFI process has no good uses". > But what do you want from SRFI? Focus on relatively mature and proven proposals over new and experimental ones. The 90 day deadline implies SRFI should put the finishing touches on things, not be an incubator of new ideas. Less importantly, focus on things that are difficult to implement in a portable and efficient way. The main (but not only) point of Scheme Review is to try and pick up some of the rest (which is very good work, but IMHO not done in the right context) so that SRFI could get back to what it does best. A process with a broader scope and no deadlines is a better incubator. NB: Scheme Review is a "carrot, not stick" approach. I can't stop anybody from submitting SRFIs if they want to. I propose Scheme Review, and did the grunt work to get it started, for the same reason as all the other projects: because nobody else stepped up to the plate! My method is to do the work others won't do, and take the flak others won't take, to solve problems. I continually ask others to do share in this work but generally they don't, so it befalls on me. Then people say that I don't get things done, lol, apparently because I don't get ten people's work done by myself. > You alternate between suggesting ways > of fixing supposed problems and hinting at SRFI’s impending doom in the > face of your alternatives. SRFI is not likely to commit suicide: the > problems are overstated, and there is no question that more work has > been done here than under the Scheme Live or Scheme Review banners. > If you want these projects to succeed, I suggest you collaborate with > SRFI instead of attacking it. I already "collaborate with" SRFI. I've written several of them, given copious feedback on many more, and just helped Arthur modernize the tooling. Over 100 commits to the srfi-common repo, started https://github.com/srfi-explorations, etc. None of the SRFI alternatives I propose are intended to replace its core function. Where did that idea come from? This debacle is a storm in a teacup from my point of view. I've made strong criticisms of R7RS-large, and I empathize very well with anyone who's upset about them. There can be only one RnRS, and if someone suggests something not to your liking, you should be upset. But I don't understand what's the fuss with the other projects. Nobody's closing down SRFI or hijacking it. Scheme.org is painstakingly designed to be as neutral as possible. Scheme Live or Scheme Review shouldn't be a threat to anybody, especially if vaporware. Some say "show me the code" as if Scheme's main problem is lacking code. The main problem is ideas, not code. Or "nothing came from your proposal" as if I'm supposed to transform an entire language community by myself in a couple of years. Or "you haven't been here long enough". But people who have been here long enough disagree widely among themselves. I alternate between different proposals because over the long term they are equivalent. I'm a big picture guy; I want go in a general direction. E.g. instead of starting Scheme Review we could restructure SRFI to accommodate the same stuff, or start an even broader Lisp Review. What I want to do at this level of detail is whatever other people are willing to go along with. I pitch something that would work whenever there is an opening. If I can draw an arc from any of these alternatives to the same long-term outcome, it doesn't matter which one to start with. Another thing I don't understand is the split sentiment that one the one hand my ideas are useless and will probably go nowhere, and on the other hand they somehow seem to be a threat. Aren't those mutually exclusive? Could they be threatening because there's something there? E.g. with "RnRS and SRFI are doomed to succeed" I meant that's where the evolutionary arc points. If you keep things on the current track you'll get that outcome entirely without my involvement. Not because these processes as planned are mistaken, but because they're being used in a way that follows the letter of the plan but not the spirit.
