jmelesky

> What are you implicitly stating here?

Good question. Actually, let's ask more simply "what are you stating here?"

> Women aren't good enough to stand toe to toe with male founders so the only way they will ever be able to succeed is if they are given special treatment.

It seems unlikely that's what they're stating. What other possible interpretations could there be? Or do you sincerely believe that the organizers of this conference are denigrating women? If so, how do you go about warning your female founder friends that this conference is denigrating them?

"Do you really think someone that doesn't have the guts to walk up to another and say "cut that out" would have the guts to walk up and hand them a card effectively saying the same thing in text?"

Of course. An agreed structure around confrontation reduces the barriers and makes the whole thing easier. That's true of most interactions, not just confrontation.

> Laziness/Strictness control

I don't think there was any compromise here, just a different choice of default. Both offer a great deal of control over what evaluation method to use.

Haskell, for what it's worth, compromised on:

* Formal definition - this is an often-overlooked win for SML, and the sort of thing that lots of languages could use.

* Module system - type classes complicate this problem, but the lack of a decent module system hurts Haskell when building large systems.

There's always w3m.el: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3m#In_Emacs

Your argument assumes that greater intelligence implies greater fitness for all jobs. I'm pretty sure there are jobs for which intelligence is not the primary requisite.

On the other hand, i certainly know of businesses using open source projects that would happily pay someone external to fix a bug or add a feature to a given project. Why they wouldn't just assign one of their own developers is a mystery, but that's the way it is.

It's been going for over seven years so far, without much in the way of marketing. I don't see why it couldn't last four more years with a little more attention.