This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 50 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 50 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
> From: Michael Sperber <sperber@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> The way the discussion is going, I feel compelled to put on my
> editor's hat for a moment. If you'll indulge me, pretend, for a
> second, that I'm not a co-author of this SRFI.
> Some of you are pretending that writing a SRFI comes with some kind of
> obligation to fulfill certain goals you think are implied by its
> title, or that the SRFI somehow implies a certain opinion or view. In
> fact, no such obligation exists outside of what the editors determine,
> and the SRFI represents a suggestion rather than a view.
I think you are misreading the posts that annoy you. It's only
because we all love you so much that we speak so harshly.
I don't think anyone on the list has any misapprehensions about the
nature of the SRFI process -- particularly about what it formally
requires or declares. Part of the beauty of the process is that
crappy srfis require 0 effort from the rest of us. Oops -- there it
is -- a crappy srfi. Of course I'm thinking especially of srfi's
number XXXX and YYYY --- real howlers, those ones are.
Rather, I think there is a common but largely unarticulated feeling
that, yes, even without those formalisms -- our community, the Scheme
community, is so smart and mature and On the Right Path that we can
use this underspecified process to produce a series of SRFIs that
would be just as good if not better than those formally required by
process to fullfill some requirement.
When someone says, to quote one of the phrases that irked you, "wasted
SRFI" -- I don't think they are misunderstanding the nature of SRFI's.
I think they are just trying to apply a verbal highlight marker to an
issue they think it worthy of your justifiable pride to consider.
They (or we) are just highlighting the delta between our perception of
your ability to perceive and express the Right Thing and the draft.
While it has the form of an insult, it's in the subjunctive voice.
"Were you to finalize _this_, you should be ashamed." It's a
compliment, really. Roughly of the form "I know there's a lot of
traffic on this list; I know you can't study every contribution in
detail; of things I might say, _this_ one should please be given
serious weight by you. I infer your values and think I share them --
and I happen to think that my position consonant with them while yours
is not -- so I want to highlight what I think will be our shared
estimation of the importance of this."
It's praise, not an insult.
-t