In defence of jd (was: A Dylan implemented on Common Lisp)

[simon@rheged.dircon.co.uk (Simon Brooke)]

In article <D53J7v.9oB@sybase.com>, Lee Schumacher <schumach@sybase.com> wrote:
>In article <D5345w.3xC@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>, jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff
>Dalton) writes:

(much excised)

>|> Note that Scott Fahlman was one of the designers of Common Lisp
>|> and had plenty of opportunities to eliminate any irritations that
>|> irritated him.
>|> 
>|> -- jd
>
>I'm sorry, but you have no standing to criticize Fahlman here.  First of
>all, CL was largely design by commitee, and no one had any absolute power
>over it.  Secondly, if anyone did have that power it was Guy Steele, who
>wrote the manual, and not Scott.  Thirdly, Scott has devoted years of his
>life to cmu cl, which is one of the most complete and robust lisps ever
>seen and is free to all.  Have you made even 1% of that contribution
>to lisp world ?  I don't think so. 

Well, I do. Jeff was practically the lone advocate of the Common LISP
project on this of the pond, in the face of an initially quite hostile
european LisP community. He played a very important liaison role
between X3J13 and BSI IST/5/16, effectively acting as ambassador for
Common LISP; and consequently the widespread international acceptance
of the Common LisP standard is partly Jeff's doing. He's also put
quite a bit of work into EuLisp (and no doubt done a lot of other
important things which I don't know about).

It must be widely known by now that I *never* agree with Jeff about
*anything*, so you can take this as an unbiased account.



-- 
------- simon@rheged.dircon.co.uk (Simon Brooke)
	
	...but have you *seen* the size of the world wide spider?