To be fair (something that people don't often accuse me of), John
Ousterhout posted a reply that among other things pointed out some
flaws in RMS' arguments. As in most things, the truth, I'm sure
lays somewhere in middle ground.
The language issues are being "discussed" on other lists. And the
issue that I'd rather keep dealing with is whether it might be
a worthwhile extension to the current architecture to allow
users to run scripts in the servers.
A lot of people are saying "what's the value" or "it wouldn't be
secure" or "it would be a burden on the server". All good questions.
And some people have shown that cgi scripts in conjunction with other
background programs can do some of this kind of work, and can make use
of e-mail as an ad-hoc back channel.
I think robot technology is nice, and it seems to me that there is
value in extending that notion so that the searching and page
aggregation can be performed, according to the user's needs, within
a server itself.
An alternative is to provide a "robot server" that accepts arbitrary
robot-scripts and sits close to a server, polling in endlessly. I don't
like the feel of that.
--karl--