Subject: Re: lisp as a mutiple team programming language? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 20:00:28 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3228580827453699@naggum.net> * Paul Wallich | Even in skilled-craft fields there is a significant place for tools that | limit what the worker can do, because even the most skilled workers | aren't always at the top of their form. How does _safety_ imply _crippling_? | For example, stage electricians learn to put safety lines on all their | tools even though that makes them less convenient, and they often use | short-handled wrenches that make it effectively impossible to overtorque | bolts or nuts. This seems like _enabling_ tools to me. If even a professional had to worry about these things all the time, they would probably err on the side of caution and be less efficient than they could be. | (It's perhaps a different level of gorilla proofing, since you don't | actually prevent people from jumping off the cliff, you just reduce the | number of cliffs and make sure there's a net pretty much everywhere.) I may be showing some Europeanisms here, incompatible with the American automotive culture, but across Europe, we generally have barriers of some kind along the side of a road without which it would be too easy to drive right into the generally unsupporting air and plummet unsafely into unpaved territory, and we also have silly laws about seat belts. Despite these limiting artefacts of our automotive culture, there is no shortage suicides by car, so the limitations in automotive freedom are hardly crippling. Quite the contrary, literally. /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief. Post with compassion: http://home.chello.no/~xyzzy/kitten.jpg