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Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

I’m sorry you had that experience. I came to Lisp in the 90’s, forged in the fires of many a comp.lang.lisp flame war. But I’ve not seen anything like you describe.

And I’ve not seen anything like that in the, albeit casual, contact I’ve had with the Lisp community since then (mostly IRC). I think the Lisp community has always been quite friendly. Especially today.

Just my experience, I wouldn’t let that one experience drive you away. Modern books a projects in the field are excellent and exciting.

To your question, I’ve never really left Lisp, it’s just not been a good fit with my work or colleagues. But I will forthrightly say I’ve argued against it when a developer wanted to incorporate Clojure into our enterprise project. I didn’t feel it was worth introducing for a couple hundred lines of code since nobody else on the team knew it.

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He's referencing an infamous c.l.l thread where pjb wrote some code that would delete all files in your hard drive.[1]

I find it silly to disregard a whole family of languages over a well-known nuisance on c.l.l, but I do not blame the poster. The proverb "one rotten apple spoils the bunch" comes to mind. In any case, this isn't the only place where pjb was simply toxic and encouraging people to stay away from a community or programming language. There is another infamous post of his on comp.lang.objective-c that is simply rude, no way to justify it.[2]

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/iKNvssI5pE4

[2] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.objective-c/c/q8Emsjoy...

pjb is very knowledgeable and helpful on IRC these days, though. People change . . .

> I find it silly to disregard a whole family of languages over a well-known nuisance on c.l.l

For years, c.l.l was plagued by a trolling Ruby advocate, who included blatantly racist content in some of his posts and signature lines.

So, don't use Ruby.

It wasn’t just pjb though. Even on the linked thread you can see another regular, not quite defending pjb for trying to wipe someone’s hard drive, being rude to the new user. And of course the name Erik Naggum is infamous.

I don’t know what the state of the community is these days, and I don’t know if a toxic community alone is a good reason to avoid a tool if it’s best-in-class. But the Lisp community definitely had a problem back then.

I don't think the "Lisp community" generally had a problem. What you remember was on an unmoderated Usenet group and by two people. Usenet was mostly unmoderated. What that means can everyday be experienced on 4Chan, 8chan, Twitter, Telegram, certain subreddits and other current social media channels - just in a million times amplified way.

Hackernews, btw. is moderated and posts/comments can be deleted by the moderators. comp.lang.lisp was not moderated.

The Lisp community at that time was much larger and way more diverse, spread over a lot of communication systems (often via Mailing lists), Universities (US with some other countries joining), R&D institutions and companies. In the very early days Usenet was only used by a small group of people (many Students and Academics), later also there were also personal accounts and private access.

Blaming the "Lisp community" now and then for the toxic behavior of two people on an unmoderated Usenet forum decades ago is not fair. In any large enough group one likely will find toxic people, that should be of no surprise.

I was participating in that Usenet forum and I never liked the toxic behavior of a few people and from the trolls (people poisen the technical discussion just for fun). This created a lot of heated discussions.

> And I’ve not seen anything like that in the, albeit casual, contact I’ve had with the Lisp community since then (mostly IRC).

I spent a lot of time in an IRC channel with a Scheme guy who would get mad whenever anyone mentioned JavaScript, because it'd given up its Scheme syntax, and insist on calling it "ECMAScript". I dunno though, that was probably just him.

Most of the internet's experience with Lisp comes from famously abusive people like Stallman and Erik Naggum though. Everyone else decided, like Norvig, that JS and Python were "enough like Lisp".

The most useful things I know of built in a Lisp are Crash Bandicoot games and the sandbox system in Mac OS X. But both of those left out the garbage collector, which is one of the main things Lisp programmers would always act endlessly superior about.

>The most useful things I know of built in a Lisp are Crash Bandicoot games [...] But both of those left out the garbage collector, which is one of the main things Lisp programmers would always act endlessly superior about.

GOAL was a target DSL in Common Lisp, so garbage collection was still aiding the development.

If referring to TinyScheme being used for sandboxing, that still uses garbage collection.

https://github.com/sungit/TinyScheme/blob/master/tinyscheme-...

GCC also uses garbage collection during the compilation process, but that doesn't make it happen at runtime or C a Scheme.

Okay, cool, but the collector is used at runtime with TinyScheme. _cons calls get_cell calls get_cell_x calls _get_cell calls gc for example; what makes you think otherwise?

The system I'm talking about uses TinyScheme as a code generation system, but doesn't use it as an interpreter in-kernel afaik.

Right. I found <https://www.ise.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/apple-sandbox....> which agrees with you (on page 9). Guess it's down to defining "at runtime" now; the TinyScheme code (and GC) and Scheme code for the sandbox definitions are shipped to a user of macOS, and the user can invoke sandbox-exec with new sandboxing definitions (e.g. <https://jmmv.dev/2019/11/macos-sandbox-exec.html>), running TinyScheme and Scheme code. So I'd think Scheme is part of the entire sandbox system, even if not in the kernel?

Sounds like it is not surprising that it does not use a GC at runtime, given that it does not use Scheme at runtime.

>The most useful things I know of built in a Lisp are Crash Bandicoot games and the sandbox system in Mac OS X

You mean apart from e.g. all Emacs packages, AutoCAD, or, well, HN?

I said "most useful" not "all useful".

…HN isn't that useful.

I find it very useful. Even "most useful". Interacting with it almost daily.

As opposed to Crash Bandicoot?

Yes.

So, Crash Bandicoot is more useful than Emacs or AutoCAD in your scale?

The people using trains, buses or cargo trucks managed by Siscog, hardly know they owe their schedules to a Lisp.

Like anyone using Google's travel infrastructure, based on ITA.

Or people who fly on planes built partially using ICad and or Genworks GDL (both Common Lisp) or maintained using Clojure (One of recent~ish airliners has diagnostic packages for maintenance techs done in Clojure)

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