Casimiro de Almeida Barreto wrote:
> [interesting story deleted to save space]
> 
> Years later an auditing consultant observed that the best way of keeping
> the status quo is always demanding the excellent even when you don't
> have the satisfactory.

I have been involed in the opposite situation - a teacher was specifying
a Smalltalk educational software I was hired to write and she hated that
the children wanted to play with computers instead of do the assignments
in the workbooks ("but they are so cute and educational!!"). So she
didn't allow me to let the computer do anything that couldn't also be
done on paper. The computer couldn't tell the students whether their
answers were right or wrong (not even give hints) but instead the
teacher would come along later and grade the assignment.

So you can either spec something so perfect it will never be built or
something that is just an awkward version of the status quo so people
won't see the point of it.

> > [Self and Java]
> >   
> Not to mention that Sun not only killed Self but did the same to
> SpringOS... :( Now they face the reality of selling mostly Intel servers
> running RedHat Linux...

Very true, but I can't blame Sun too much for this. Their customers had
suffered greatly in the transition from SunOS to Solaris and now Sun was
talking about yet another change in the future? So they felt they had to
kill SpringOS and yell "Solaris forever!" just to keep their clients
from moving to their competitors. They also tried to kill TCL (they had
previously spun it out and then brought it back in) too, so it was just
their style at the time :-)

-- Jecel