Kent M Pitman  <pitman@world.std.com> wrote:
+---------------
| It used to be that people waited for a new rev of the standard to tell
| them what tools are being used.  The "New Way" is for you to _first_ be 
| successful with something and _then_ lobby for its acceptance by the 
| community based on that success.
+---------------

Actually, that's the old, old way, too. It used to be the case that
standards were defined by codifying "best practice" (modulo some
compromise if there were multiple extant "best" practices), but then...

<FLAME>
Standards committees [not Lisp, particularly, but in general] started
going wild thinking that *they* were the architects of the future
(not the people who actually knew how stuff worked!) and we went into
a long period where little new happened until *after* some standards
committee had already frozen the new thing beyond the point of redeeming
any fatal flaws (e.g., FDDI, ATM, etc.).
</FLAME>

Fortunately, that seems to be changing somewhat, and we're fortunately
reverting (at least somewhat) to the old, old way of "demonstrate one
or more working implementations first" [which is the same as what Kent
calls the "New Way"].


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock, PP-ASEL-IA		<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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