Re: your posting and Holmes' reply

[veion@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi]

> Date: Thu, 3 Nov 1994 06:05:22 -0500
> From: Logical Language Group <lojbab@access.digex.net>
> To: veion@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi
> Subject: your posting and Holmes' reply
> 
> I haven't read your post, but I found Randall Holmes' reply to it
> incredibly pompous.  Even if your ideas are wrong, he could have
> expressed it more politely (I read what he said as basically just telling
> you to "shut up".)
> 

  I received a short note from him afterwards, not quite an apology,
  but I guess he was trying to soften the impact somewhat.

RH>From catseye.idbsu.edu!holmes Tue Nov  1 01:48:29 1994
RH>
RH> When I read my post, I felt that I was pontificating from too high a
RH> level, though.  An examination of ways in which you feel that Prolog
RH> is related to Loglan-style languages might be instructive, for example!
RH>
RH>				--Randall Holmes

  His original choice of words wasn't perhaps the most appropriate, but
  I think that there are moments when at least I need to told to shut up.
  Nothing is more frustrating than to find out I've been on a wild goose
  chase for weeks, just because noone has had the guts to spell it out
  clearly enough. OTOH, it is easier to take it from an outsider.

> I find your contribution on this and other subjects rather more coherent
> and more often correct than what others write, so feel free to ignore Holmes.
> 

  I been wrong enough many enough times just because I haven't read 
  the material I have carefully enough - this doesn't imply that the
  said material is free of errors :-)

  Some of the problems we have been discussing are quite tough, and
  I have found it comforting that even people like Russell & Whitehead
  did go amiss while handling rather similar ones (I just read 
  Wittgenstein and also von Wright's commentary on Wittgenstein's
  own errors)

> pc is long-winded and sometimes indecisive, but I am glad HE is the logician
> in our camp, and Holmes is the one is TLI's camp.  I think it better to
> encourage people to try things and to express their ideas than to chop
> off people like Holmes seems to (and not just with you).  That way we all
> learn.
>

  It would take more than Holmes to shut me up if I'd disagree with
  him. I've had to weather handling which was a magnitude rougher.
  
> Even with Loglan/Lojban, we are talking about language first, and logic
> second.  Our design has to remember this fact.
> 

  I agree.

> lojbab
> 

   Veijo