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Subject:Reaction to Certification Survey From:Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- FS -dot- COM -dot- AU> Date:Sun, 15 Jun 1997 00:08:17 +0800
The reaction to Bill DuBay's post was intolerant and excessive.
If you are one of the people who joined in the feeding frenzy, I invite
you to reread his message, then reread yours.
Bill didn't claim to be summarising the cases for and against. He didn't
claim to be reporting the relative popularity of each position. He
didn't even claim to be presenting the results of a survey (no, really;
read what he said). It was unfortunate that he chose to call his exercise
a 'survey', but he's not the first person on this list to be guilty of
that.
I thought his message said:
- thanks to the people who helped
- here's a list of the points made
- please read the article when it appears
I imagine Bill thought he was doing the right thing by saying a public
"thank you" and by giving something back to the list. I'm sure he won't
make that mistake again.
Sure, his paraphrases of the arguments were one-sided. A couple of
respondents rightly picked him up on that. The rest either reacted to
their own misreading of his words, or didn't even bother trying to make
a reasoned case and just got stuck in.
I'm not in favour of certification. Some of you will know that I am very
much in favour of a bit of creative heckling. But this was not fair.
Regards
---
Stuart Burnfield
Functional Software Pty Ltd mailto:slb -at- fs -dot- com -dot- au
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