Cartwright

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

Well, from Dick's description Cartwright sounds OK.  I am not a big fan
of formal semantics for anything, so I start out being skeptical of such
people, but if the person in question has a lot of big-project
experience, that is the proper antidote.  There remains the question of
whether the person knows enough about Common Lisp to contribute and
whether he agrees with the idea of starting from the Steele book rather
than starting from scratch.

There's a larger problem, however, and that is the person's visibility
to the Common Lisp community, defined as roughly the set of people who
have been following the Common Lisp mailing list.  We're need to be able
to say to people from various companies that the people on the technical
committee have a lot of experience both in language design and
implementation, and that we just didn't see anyone with those
credentials at Company X.  Having an unknown on the committee
(especially when we can't list a couple of things that the person has
done that clearly show why he is qualified) makes it a lot harder to go
with this argument.  Someone like Walter vanRoggen, say, might argue
that he is not in a class with Steele or Moon, but is at least as well
qualified to help decide the future of Common Lisp as Corky Cartwright,
whoever he is.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't take this guy, but we should think hard
about whether he really adds anything.  You guys have been counting Rees
as the formalist -- is Cartwright stronger here?

-- Scott