Committee members

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>]

I just got back from a few days with my family and saw Dick's analysis.
I basically agree with him that technical merit ought to be more
important than representing every group that might otherwise complain.
I would add just one twist to Dick's criteria, however: I think that
where a major constituency (such as stock hardware) is concerned, it is
best to have two obviously independent voices.  That makes it hard to
say, "Well, the only stock hardware guys are from Lucid and we all know
that those guys have a weird point of view."  Including both Moon and
Bobrow gives us two independent perspectives on microcodable machines,
with me providing part of a third one (from my work with the Perq).
The big hole that I see is someone who has done some practical
implementation work, preferably from industry, on stock hardware, and
who has nothing to do with Lucid.  People would view me as coming from
the same direction, even though that is not altogether true.  Griss
fills the bill here, and while he hasn't been all that active in Common
Lisp, he is not terribly hard to get along with.  Other suggestions to
fill the same niche?

An issue I have been thinking a lot about is whether to follow Weinreb's
suggestion that we keep him on our proposed committee, for use as a
bargaining chip if we need one, or whether we should drop him ourselves.
The more I think about it, the more I think that we should have only one
hard-core Symbolics person in the group we propose.  I've never liked
bargaining chips.  We've told the community "Trust us.  We'll do our
very best to come up with a committee that is as fair as we can make it,
while still keeping the size down and including only people of high
competence and standing in the community."  A lot of people will look at
our proposal and, if it is reasonably fair, go away reasonably happy or
at least without a lot of sympathy for any complaints they may have.  If
the list we produce seems self-serving, we might never have a chance to
bargain; people who are disgruntled might just give up on us.  Or if we
do start making concessions, it might be hard to stop.  I would much
prefer to produce a list that I am convinced is as fair as we can make
it, and then fight hard for that list.  And I wouldn't feel good
fighting for both Moon and Weinreb, when so many of Symbolics' direct
competitors have nobody on the committee.

(Once again, this has nothing to do with Weinreb's talent, for which I
have great regard.  The issue is solely one of double representation for
Symbolics; if Moon were not also on the committee, I would fight hard to
include Weinreb.)

So, RPG's list looks fine to me, excpet that we should add either Griss
or someone else from industry who does stock hardware implementations.
And we should discuss with Mathis (and eventually with Chailloux) how to
structure things so that one group thinks about Common Lisp and another
thinks about subsets or smaller languages.  I don't know Rees or Bawden
well enough to know which of these we want most (or maybe both).

-- Scott