I met Richard on a Google blog http://groups.google.com/group/comp.programming/browse_thread/thread/794134f22be00b67/f9d8d91c15320f72?show_docid=f9d8d91c15320f72 , and commented that so many of the comments were totally off the mark. Here is his very philosophical answer - very impressive!
"I'm not particularly surprised at the varied responses, including the wrong-minded ones. Such is the nature of open fora, particularly when the ideas being presented are unfamiliar. Bester (or was it H.L. Gold) once characterized the ideas in SF as being like a conversation in a pub. The idea spinning is the kind of playing with ideas that goes on when the day's work is done and you sitting with friends and having a cool one. There is another side to pub conversations; they get very heated at times and many have strong opinions about things about which they know very little.
"There is another side to these discussion groups; when one is thinking out something one can use them as sounding boards. Amidst all the dross there will be some things to think about. More often than not the useful comments are misunderstandings rather than suggestions. In this case the comments tell me that the advantages were not well spelled out and that there should have been more about the different kinds of dataflow languages.
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