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Date:      Fri, 22 Nov 1996 10:24:55 +1030 (CST)
From:      Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
To:        terry@lambert.org (Terry Lambert)
Cc:        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, davidn@sdev.usn.blaze.net.au, terry@lambert.org, roberto@keltia.freenix.fr, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Who needs Perl?  We do!
Message-ID:  <199611212354.KAA15374@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <199611212009.NAA13774@phaeton.artisoft.com> from Terry Lambert at "Nov 21, 96 01:09:31 pm"

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Terry Lambert stands accused of saying:
> > It's not a question of whether _everyone_ needs it, but whether a
> > sufficient number of people need it.  I think that so far the evidence
> > indicates that this is the case.
> 
> Not _everyone_ needs an appendectomy.
> 
> But perhaps a _suficient_ number of people need them, so we should
> remove everyone's appendix at age 6.

Oh please; I think you can do better than that.  p -> q <=/=> !p -> !q

Perhaps "Not everyone needs tetanus immunisation, but it helps a lot of
people, so we immunise at age 6".  If further research shows that 
immunisation sucks, then we can stop.

> > I'm entirely in agreement with the basic principle, but I strongly
> > believe that we need to incorporate mature and ubiquitous tools in
> > as seamless and standard a fashion as possible.
> 
> This is a different argument entirely... it is a complaint that the
> installation dependency process is insufficiently seamless.

No it is _not_.  Any statically-configured system is vulnerable to
variation in usage pattern; the simple intent here is to cover more of
the possible requirements in the out-of-the-box configuration in a
reasonable fashion.

> 					Terry Lambert

-- 
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer        msmith@gsoft.com.au             [[
]] Genesis Software                     genesis@gsoft.com.au            [[
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