Peter Norvig's book reviews on Amazon
amazon.com
amazon.com
To the reviewer who said "I was looking forward to a detailed insight into
neural networks in this book. Instead, almost every page is plastered up
with sigma notation", that's like saying about a book on music theory
"Instead, almost every page is plastered with black-and-white ovals (some
with sticks on the edge)." Or to the reviewer who complains this book is
limited to the mathematical side of neural nets, that's like complaining
about a cookbook on beef being limited to the carnivore side.
http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-Learning-Informati...
...In Graham's prose, like his code, every word counts...
Fascinating to read Peter Norvig describe ten years ago what most people tend to say about pg's essays and general writing style.
So when he finally released it, some lispers were disappointed because they've been waiting for something really disruptive. And it backfired as most of the time, the harshest critics comes from your disappointed sympathizers.
That being said, I don't hang that much on IRC so I have no real back-story supporting this.
My theory is that because most of those people are very intelligent yet utterly ineffectual, they act as a kind of support group for one another. They view Lisp as a monastic order where in order to keep the tradition alive, one is forced by the circumstances to give up all his worldly ambitions. PG didn't buy it, and succeeded. So to keep the ideology consistent, you need to introduce the assumption that PG is not a "true" Lisper.
(Just an educated guess about the root of the problem, I have no idea of what goes on in IRC.)
Could he have initially posted before Sept. 11 and then edited the post after? Or did Amazon screw something up with the dates?
That kind of crap happens all the time.