On 8/15/07, Adrien Pierard pierarda@iro.umontreal.ca wrote:
On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 02:39:37PM -0500, Bill Richter wrote :
(A lot of typically self-serving material about how wonderfully smart he is)
Bill Richter is not your ordinary garden-variety troll in that he does appear to have an actual ability to learn, but he is a person with some serious issues - serious enough that he earned his very own internet FAQ http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/will/Ephemera/richterFAQ.html
And OK, 3 years is a moderate amount of time to pass and perhaps he's getting better, but his tone in posting sounded almost exactly like way back when, and the R6RS debate is perfectly seeded for his shenanigans. In short, I had no intention of responding to him, no matter what the provocation (hah! I am too much of a jerk in my own self to really live up to that, but I did plan to try :)
I hope that I didn't hurt anyone with what I just said (teacher, student, NTI decision-maker, type-system addict...), but as someone who just loved studying an "unknown" part of CS (category Theory), I felt the urge to answer "DS is important (to those who care, for those who don't) !".
Well you sure didn't hurt me. I have dabbled in many of the same topics you have, and it appears it may have been for the same reasons. In Computing Science you do have the opportunity to understand the whole system 'all the way down to the turtles that hold up the earth' - metaphoricallly speaking :) But part of Bill's expertise is that he makes you feel like you ought to engage him in a debate - and it so rarely turns out well.
I hope I don't end up hating myself for this pre-emptive warning. On the other hand, I *really* don't want to watch an extended Bill-debate on an implementation-specific mailing list...
david rush