Re: Application holy wars vs religious reformation

["Elna Tymes" <etymes -at- lts -dot- com>]

Bill-

Thank you for you treatise.  I mean *really* thank you!  I wish more Whirlers
would spend the time and mental energy into thinking through commentary like
this - I truly enjoy well-reasoned pieces like this.

Your point is, basically, that people who are comfortable with both a tool and
their reasons for using it are likely to be more vociferous in their defense of
it when they don't see a reason for moving to the next evolutionary level.
Which begs the question "Where are we headed?"  And the problem with that
question is that it's too broad, given that we're evolving from paper-based
information to other forms, but "other" is wide open.  We have a lot of startups
and project managers within bigger organizations betting their respective groups
on one technology or another, but there's no consensus as to where information
dissemination is headed, except massively outward.  Given that Whirlers are
intimately associated with information dissemination, and for making
recommendations for tools and media related to it, obviously Whirlers are going
to care more than your average reader about appropriate information tools.  It
follows that tool-related holy wars would spring up here from time to time.

But you're right on the money in terms of wondering what the next generation of
tools will be like.  I happen to feel that tools like Frame+SGML and Adept are
incremental moves, and not necessarily in the right direction, but their spread
will probably provoke some other improvements in what turn out to be "right"
directions.

Elna Tymes
Los Trancos Systems