Committee Membership

[Daniel L. Weinreb <DLW@SCRC-QUABBIN.ARPA>]

Gee, I hope somebody knows what the steering committee does.

OK, if the Kyoto guys are junior then I think Ida would be a good
choice, from a political point of view.  He's definitely very much
pro-Common Lisp, and is already trying to get it established as a
standard in Japan.  He also was in charge of getting the Japanese
translation created (has anybody noticed any other translations yet?).
If we're going to be international, we need someone from Japan, and I
think he's the only remaining candidate.

In my experience, I have found Greenblatt to be a generally good person.
Although sometimes vague, if you keep asking him questions you can
usually figure out what he's talking about.  However, he's generally
frustrating to work with.  He gets strange ideas in his head and sticks
to them stubbornly.  He is a great programmer in the sense of generating
lots of working code quickly, but he is a poor programmer in the sense
of elegance and style.  It took us years, for example, to get him to
admit that there was some merit in using DO rather than PROG for
straightfowards iteration.  We never got him to use 2-d arrays; he felt
they were inherently expensive, and always rolled his own out of 1-D
arrays.  When I started working with him, he was a dyed-in-the-wool
assembly language programmer.  He has definitely improved since then,
but the idea of him as a Lisp language designer still doesn't seem right
to me.