Russ, your description of "technical osmosis" rings true for me. I'd like to keep tabs on the evolving perl6 -- perhpas finding a niche where I can contribute. I'm hoping "IETF" as a model just means a consensus based on a "written" (i.e. publicly posted) document. Take the good part of it... Carl Friedberg, carl@comets.com -----Original Message----- From: Russ Allbery [mailto:rra@stanford.edu] ... I live and breath by technical osmosis; it's how I pick up almost everything I'm interested in. Technical osmosis is the practice of joining a newsgroup or mailing list for some topic, 90% of which you don't understand, and just reading through it, letting the traffic go by, at least reading the subjects and trying to get a superficial understanding, day after day, for an extended period of time. Unified development lists are wonderful for this; from years of reading p5p, I now understand Perl in a way that I never would have if I had to sort through tons of separate lists, only subscribe to half or less of them, and never have a unified understanding of what's going on. ... Thirdly, so that the generalists can see how all those cool ideas that were being talked about earlier actually came out in the end. I like this. This I think would work for me. -- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>Thread Previous | Thread Next