This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI discuss from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI discuss contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
OK, this may seem like a silly idea but I'll throw it out there anyway... A lot of people are intimidated on SRFI mailing lists, often because they may not know much about the material in question. This is unfortunate because Schemers often come from widely different backgrounds and have useful views and specific knowledge to contribute. On the other hand, people who *are* familiar with the topic may reply hastily before reading and comprehending the entire SRFI. Or they may in fact just be clueless. One possible attempt to both alleviate arguments arising from misinterpretation of the SRFI, as well as to encourage opinions from those less familiar with the topic, would be to optionally publish a quiz along with each SRFI. The quiz could cover major anticipated misinterpretations and involve a handful of brief programming problems, so people could get a feel for how the system would work in practice. Nothing long or involved, but after reading the draft and preparing to participate in the discussion, an extra 10 minutes or so to run through a quiz certainly isn't very demanding of time. Rather than being intimidating, I think this would in fact encourage more casual users if they get a passing score - they'd have more confidence that they weren't missing the big issues or making a stupid assumption. This would be an honor system of course - no one would collect and grade the quizzes. -- Alex