I thought that these questions had been conclusively settled, as chronicled in that fine documentary The Core

I think that was the point. Donaldson came to a convention in Ottawa many (25?) years ago and gave a keynote speech on the role of the hero in literature (or something like that). I think he wanted to create a fantasy epic that was more nuanced than the good guys wearing white and the bad guys wearing black.

I was just trying to get one of my friends to read it, today. It was very thought-provoking. I remember that another friend of mine, a Catholic priest, based one of his sermons on it.

I really liked the Covenant series, but found the Gap to be unrelentingly bleak and cynical. "People are bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling." Covenant conveyed an essential belief in the value of goodness, beauty and sacrifice. The Gap was kind of the opposite.

That was exactly my experience. My eyes were opened to an understanding of personal responsibility and morality that was certainly at odds with the world around me.

P.S. Donaldson responded to my letter(s?) and was very gracious, interesting and intelligent when I met him in person.

I was about 15 when I first came across them, and they challenged me more than almost any other books I've read. I've been reading since I was 4, and I think that I had a good vocabulary even then.

They (at least the first two trilogies) are very strongly based on the Bible (e.g. the first trilogy, all about recovering the Staff of Law, has many similarities to the Old Testament, all about the Mosaic Law; the second trilogy deals with sin and redemption and sacrifice on a personal level, like the New Testament; many of the terms like Elohim and Jehannum are biblical).

I happen to find these allegories deepen and improve the story. I've read the first two trilogies something like ten times over the past thirty years, and they still have new messages each time.

It's also worth noting that the Catholic school system in Ontario represent almost 1/3 of all the students. Students in other separate schools are much, much smaller numbers. Why do we get Christmas as a holiday instead of Naw-Ruz (Zoroastrianism)? Sometimes a large minority is treated differently from a small one.

In my city, a guy opened a Thai/Cambodian restaurant. After a few years, he sold it and opened another. This happened four times, and each of the restaurants (all except the last within a four-block radius) seem to be doing fine. Many of the customers followed Pat from restaurant to restaurant, but they all serve quite decent food, with extremely similar menus.

Probably point #2, where you suggest firing programmers who can't meet deadlines that you set. Sometimes things just bog down. There's a difficult bug; something that seemed simple at design time has proven to be complex; later developments have forced a rewrite of earlier code. And programmers are not machines: they are more productive sometimes, and less productive sometimes.

And, of course, sometimes the fault is due to circumstances beyond the programmer's control. Customers change their minds, or don't give complete specs. Co-workers become uncooperative, or sometimes even hostile and sabotage other people's projects.

Sometimes all the work gets done on time, but sometimes it doesn't. To lay the blame at the programmer's feet is unfair. Not to say that you shouldn't get rid of unproductive programmers (or any workers), but software development is notoriously difficult to find good metrics for.