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Comment by moonchild | Hacker News Reader

Don't Build Your Own Lisp provides some harsh—and IMO totally justified—criticism: https://gist.github.com/no-defun-allowed/7e3e238c959e27d4919...

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The criticism may be justified but jeez the person who wrote that comes off like a HUGE asshole. Reminds me of people I've worked with in the past who think they know everything and have an arrogance so thick you could cut it with a knife.

Every Lisp programmer I've ever met is like this. I don't know why, but it's probably Erik Naggum's fault. They used to be called "Lisp weenies" and now would be called "abusers".

(The Clojure and Racket people are supposedly nice.)

I've seen Erik Naggum's name mentioned in this context before, but years ago I looked through a bunch of his contribution on comp.lang.lisp and couldn't see anything justifying this reputation. His articles rather looked quite eloquent and thought-through. Could you provide an example?

Alas it's been a long time and I don't remember enough anymore. I just remember what I used to remember.

There's some here (http://xahlee.info/Netiquette_dir/death_of_a_troll.html) and classic discussion can be found at (https://wiki.c2.com/?SocialProblemsOfLisp). The rest of the odd pattern of every Lisp programmer I've ever met being an asshole is mostly lost to IRC history, but I guess RMS is another example.

I've accessed that wiki.c2 for various discussions about programming before. However, I get confused with the format, specially here where it seems like a thread full of comments (no mention of usernames) there. (I like the relative minimalism and simplicity of the discourse though)

I just re-read Xah's notes and all of that rings a bell, but off of comp.lang.lisp Erik could be incredibly kind in helping other programmers. I was working my way through an early edition of _A programmer's guide to Common Lisp_ by Deborah Tatar and got absolutely stumped on the chapter on macros. Erik worked with me over email until we actually found what appeared to be a typo in the example source code and was incredibly patient with my dumb mistakes.

"God help you if you are going to write your first interpreter in C of all things... Without manual intervention[,] C programs do pretty much no error detection... I hate C with a passion." -- Hayley Patton, Don't Build Your Own Lisp

"What a whiny little bitch." -- wudangmonk, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27601530

When I look at these two statements, I wouldn't describe the first as being particularly abusive.

I've found the Emacs Lisp crowd to also be nice.

"I hate C with a passion." There it is, their problem.

Jesus just reading the first paragraph tells me everything I need to know about this person, what a whiny little bitch.

Lisp and C are my favorite languages and most of the people I know who like one tend to like the other. I was surprised by this guy who praises lisp but hates C with such a passion.

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