From his 'On LISP' review:
...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.
...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.
(Just an educated guess about the root of the problem, I have no idea of what goes on in IRC.)
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.