Communications on a National Project
3/7/2004 4:01 PM
Paul,
To answer your question,
> Is the proposal concepts from John M...
> a better place to put 10 B? We are looking for 60 M.
Neither one of those projects has a prayer of a hope of being
funded by the current administration and their social/economic theory.
Furthermore, I don't believe that a centrally controlled
approach would be best for either one -- primarily because I don't believe that
anybody knows how to spend that much money on knowledge-based computing
research.
My recommendation for how to spend $60 million would be for
40 projects in the $1 to 2 million range, and my recommendation for how to
spend $10 billion would be 5,000 projects in the $1 to 2 million range -- with
projects that have shown good results in the first year given continuing grants
for subsequent years.
The Python 3 project is a good example. I like Python, and I am using it to
implement a CLCE parser (which I plan to release under the GPL license). But that project is good project
on its own, independent of any of the others. There is no need to put it under a big umbrella
organization.
I would say the same for the other ideas that are being
tossed around. A lot of them are
promising, but there is no clear idea of how any of them fit with any of the
others. I'd rather not put them
together until their relationships to the others have been clarified. Putting them all in the same
organization would create more bureaucracy than synergy.
John