The article was interesting and entertaining too. Good (and bad) committee outcomes happen as described, when one or a few individuals seize the initiative, se

The article was interesting and entertaining too. Good (and bad) committee outcomes happen as described, when one or a few individuals seize the initiative, setting out their ideas in a more or less finished form. Other committee members may feel blindsided but in the crunch there's insufficient time to produce alternatives. It's a lesson worth our attention. The story evoked a personal element, going back to when I was first learning programming in the 80's. Early on one of the serious hurdles I encountered was recursion. (Another was pointers and indirection.) After struggling to wrap my brain around the thing that kept calling itself, I ran across a book, "Thinking Recursively" by Eric S. Roberts, 1986, which was enormously helpful. I consider the book a classic. And it must be since it's still in print! I'd highly recommend it for anyone who finds recursion unintuitive. Way back then it wasn't intuitive to me either, but with the book as a guide in time it became as natural as breathing air.