Subject: [lojban] Re: Why we should cancel the vote or all vote NO (was

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 12:27:26 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 2 Dec 2002, And Rosta wrote:

> If the product of tinkering is something of general value, then today's
> tinkering is tomorrow's valuable design feature. Our choice is whether
> we want to bequeathe to our heirs a Lojban as good as we could make it
> in the circumstances (which includes our leaving certain decisions to
> them). I accept that this is not a prime consideration for current
> Lojbanists.

I'd prefer to bequeath to them THIS Lojban, and the lessons that can only
come from healthy usage, which can only come from a stable language -- and
let them worry about the next revision of the language. I'd rather have,
in my lifetime and soon an imperfect language with a body, rather than 20
years on a document that offers a beautiful but untested, unused language.

It's the same way with software. A team can literally keep working on a
project, refusing to release it until it's perfected, for so long that
it's obsolete before it's released. The lesson of the Xanadu project is
the canonical case; a hypertext system started decades before the Web,
which was trumped by the current Web technology precisely because the
latter was imperfect, cheap, dirty, and simple.

-- 
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.