expansion of list

[gls@Think.COM (Guy Steele)]

[Others added back--hope you don't mind.]


   Date: Wed, 1 Nov 89 16:54 EST
   From: Kent M Pitman <KMP@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>

   [Others removed.]

   Your analysis also leaves out who initiated the proposals, who
   contributed to shaping them, who contributed to finalizing them.  e.g.,
   I am the `initiator' on a whole pile of them, while (I suspect--I
   haven't counted) Masinter is the `finisher' on a lot of them.  This is
   because a lot of what I did was to transfer things we learned about CLtL
   from the Macsyma port into the CL design process, while Masinter's role
   was to try to achieve consensus among things that other people were
   suggesting.  (Of course, the boundaries are blurred because people were
   really doing different things at different times and no one person
   really took on any role exclusively--I'm just generalizing a bit to
   explain certain particular statistics.)

   But anyway, it's probably not worth dwelling on (which is why I didn't
   cc this even to the others on the "q" list) since I think that any attempt
   to define "useful involvement" may cause people who don't think they are
   getting enough points to either feel unappreciated, or to redirect their
   efforts to what the bean counters are emphasized--either of which could
   be harmful to the already-resource-starved process.

   Anyway, your numbers were interesting.

You are absolutely right, and I was alluding to all this in my disclaimer
(that my counting process allotted the same weight to (lcm)=1 at to a big
proposal).  Similarly, RPG, for example, put a ton of effort into the CLOS
proposal but his name doesn't show up on dozens of different proposals.
All I wanted to say was that even by this crude measure it was obvious that
certain people such as yourself were heavily involved and contributing a
ton of work.  Another thing the histogram showed me was that the disparity
was so great that if you first discarded the half-dozen "major" proposals
such as the condition system and CLOS, then the weightings didn't matter
that much: it was obvious that you, Larry, Dave, and Sandra were each doing
more work than anyone else on generating and polishing proposals.
Lots of other people have contributed to the discussions, but you four
were taking the responsibility of summarizing and redistributing them.
That's all.