I wanted to send this message out after the final status report, but since that's indefinitely delayed (keep going!) I'm just going to do it now.
Easy question: has keeping this dialogue open been useful to the folks at VPRI, or has it been more of a burden than anything else? I can definitely say that it's been very good for me, in that I learned a hell of a lot reading all of the lovely papers posters cited. It's also been a lot of fun meeting people who were interested in a lot of the same things that I was. I'm not so happy about my own contribution though. Did I do anything at all to advance the state of the art? Well, no. I mostly just flapped my lips. It's asymmetrical, I learned way more than I taught. The best I could do was play sounding board for some of Ian's ideas while dinking around with Maru's guts. BTW if you haven't looked at it, Maru is way cool. VPRI has done something pretty awesome and weird here, in that the dialogue was wide open the whole time. As I gather, it was in the spirit of ARPA. We've had our share of trolls, long-winded posters (raises hand) and just general chaos. I really enjoyed the guy who called us all a bunch of Alan Kay fanboys the other day by the way. That was just priceless. Like we can't think for ourselves! (Alan if I can get an autograph after this I think I'll be set.) So seriously, has this been worthwhile? I'm not just asking VPRI folks, though I'm DEFINITELY asking VPRI folks, I'm also asking everyone else on the list. I learned a lot, huge win for me, and we talked in circles a bunch, some of that was fun. I can also think of a few parts where I felt pretty strongly that it *was* worthwhile. To throw out an example, remember when Dale Schumacher asked pretty poignantly whether or not the original idea behind objects/messages was similar to the actor model? That was like a blockbuster for nerds it was so awesome. That totally rocked. That's me. Okay now talk amongst yourselves go! ? _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
