Greg:
Your worry is relevant and in standards work where consensus (not
unanimity) is the rule, it means that folks have to work at it rather than
"waiting for Godot". The reason that the MDC was succesfull was that there
was wide participation, interest, and activity; I believe that that still
can be the case. Part of the effort is educating folks on what standards
developement is all about - and its not about sitting around letting
others do the work so you can get "free lunch". The MUMPS community needs
to re-educate its constituents about that point and to provide mechanmisms
for them to participate. Chris Richardson has ideas about using the more
recent means to achieve waht we used to by onsite meetings (which can be
useful and not entirely discarded). The world has re-acquired some of the
"citadel mentality" of Troy/Mycenae (circa 1200BC) as is paying the prices
for either dictating from the citadel or passively accepting it wating fro
Free lunch (There is and never was any Free Lunch so we have to reaffirm
that regulalry). De Facto mandates result from look for free lunch. I
think much better of those who have been in the MUMPS Community and it
stems from Octo Barnett who started it all. We just need to get up a head
of steam and stand out! An we then wont be hemmed in.
On Tue, 13 Sep 2005, Gregory Woodhouse wrote:
That's a good point. Personally, I think Ada is an underrated language (Tony
Hoare's famous comment, notwithstanding), but the idea that its use should be
mandatory for mission critical applications is quite different from its
standardization. Even so, standards have a way of becoming de facto mandates,
which is unfortunate because the end result is that people are afraid of
developing standards for fear of being tied to an immutable standard that no
longer fits their needs.
===
Gregory Woodhouse
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"A hero is no braver than an ordinary
man, but he is brave five minutes longer."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
On Sep 13, 2005, at 9:43 AM, A. Forrey wrote:
Greg:
you have to understand that standards are common conventions for
communicatiing about a spubject. The common misundertsatnding is that they
are "specifications". If you cant communicate clearly then you are just not
in the ballgame; the MDC just keeps us in the ballgame rather than
wandering blind and ignorant in the desert. It takes all players
communicating to get the bennies and there are many wys to do that but this
notice from ONCHIT is "Communicate or you're not in the game!". The VistA
Community has to figure out how they will be in the WHOLE game; MUMPS
deals with the technology platform for VistA - that all; but without it you
have to go out and re-engineer the whole architecture at great cost (maybe
the VA uppercrust has that in mind, it remains to be seen). The log cabin
era is over, so that technology platform role of MUMPS is one building
bl;oick, so lets do it right. Sorry to be so blunt but that reality.
Arden
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