Re: Mail, Domain Names, NSLUG, and 7.2 and 8.0, and the coming ice age in Hell.

[Kenneth Forbus <forbus@p.cs.uiuc.edu>]

	While this is true, I don't think it means "There is no point having any
	mail reader at all" or "We might as well have a minimal, crufty mail
	reader."  Consider that many personal computers now come with a mouse;
	since you can't tell your funding agency to buy a Symbolics machine just
	because it has a mouse, does that mean there should be no mouse at all?

Of course not.  But, as you say below, it is a matter of priorities.
I'm not going to rag Symbolics as a company if they fall behind in
Zmail upgrades.  I will if performance slides.  

	Based on responses we get from our users, we feel that some of them
	value the Symbolics system because of the benefits of its programming
	environment, and that they would not be happy with a computer that had
	(1) a 1GB address space, (2) a very fast implementation of what's in
	"Common Lisp the Language", and (3) nothing else.

	Look, suppose we provided the batch-oriented simplistic crunch box
	described above.  Would you enjoy using that to develop your AI
	programs?

Yes and no.  While debugging, of course not.  Reliable error handlers,
for instance, make a world of difference.  ZGRAPH, our local package
that draws arbitrary directed graphs (doing cycles properly as cycles,
not by breaking them), is a crucial debugging tool for us.  But I
spend alot of time RUNNING programs as well as writing them.  And we
are in the stage of putting alot of serious programs together to make
yet larger systems to tackle some very tough problems.  Performance is
a major problem in those circumstances.  We could soak up a factor of
10 in performance improvement without blinking.  In a couple of years,
as the phenomena we tackle grow more complex, it will get even worse.
If someone offered me that simplisitic crunch box right now, that
would run my "lilly-pure" CL programs w/o windows an order of
magnitude faster, I would start raising the money ASAP!!

If such boxes appear Symbolics should sell a programming environment
for them, and then everyone would be happy :-).


	For those of us who program in teams, electronic mail is as
	vital a tool as an editor or a debugger.  Ken, when was the last time
	you wre a member of a five-person team working on a commercial software
	product?

I have between 6 and 9 students at any time, and we work on projects
in various subgroups collaboratively.  Rarely more than four people
per group, but there are several such groups at any time, and email is
about 1/2 of the communication involved.  I have a long-term
collaboration with Johan at PARC, which includes code development,
that takes place mostly by email.  (None of this involves commercial
products, but I don't think that is an important difference.)  And
about half of the administrivia that hits me does so by email.  So I
use email ALOT.  But not zmail.  I find UNIX mail, while far from
perfect, is adequate.

Naturally, people's priorities differ.  I did not say Symbolics should
not provide a mailer, nor that Symbolics should not work on mailers,
just that it shouldn't surprise anyone if that isn't the highest
priority on your queue!