the perfect program

[Avery Andrews 950827]
(Rick Marken (950825.2300))

>>We know what works best and it is always in line with the theory.
>
>It sounds like you believe that there is no way to improve your
>program; you know what works best and it is always in line with the
>theory. ...

It doesn't sound like that to me at all, what it does sound like
is that maybe people such as Rick or I who have zero knowledge of
the environment that Ed Ford is working in have minimal chances
of making useful suggestions about how the program might be changed,
which seems quite sensible to me: after all, the most complex PCT
model is probably the Arm demo, and inner-city school-kids are
maybe 10 to 100 million times more complicated than that, so I'd
expect practical experience and street smarts to loom large in
any successful applcation.

And while it is good to encourage people to express themselves more
clearly, there must be better ways of doing it than putting the
worst possible construction on every individual sentence they produce,
regardless of its context, or any other information about what
they're doing. Maybe the email format is part of the problem
here, since it's so easy to pull individual sentences out of
a message and respond to them individually, without thinking about
what the whole message might be about.

Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au