Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

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> My objective here is not to attack you for your partisan support of Naggum

Look, I'm not supporting Naggum.

From the actual Lisp users I've met in real life, few were reading comp.lang.lisp, almost none was posting there. Very few would even know who the people there were.

The actual people in the Lisp community I admire are many - I could list 100 - they had a much greater impact on what was happening. Most of them never used comp.lang.lisp . Among women the participation rate was near zero!

Most of the interesting communication was in specific communities over mailing lists. I fondly remember SLUG (the Symbolics Lisp Users Group), the MCL mailing list, and several others.

comp.lang.lisp had the most negative impact by trolls, like the one Naggum was answering, which caused endless bullshit discussions and which had very destructive behavior. We never found a way to deal with that. What it killed in the end was that the time for Usenet was over, Google groups, spam, it was mostly irrelevant and a much more toxic Internet took over. See 4chan, various Reddit groups (though the Lisp subreddits at Reddit do better) and X for much worse communication systems. Plus Lisp was in a general demise in the 90s. Not the Usenet caused the demise of Lisp, but the demise of Lisp was causing a general lack of interest. Cause and effect were different of what you claim.

For you the contact to Lisp could be mostly net related (?). When I was learning at the university roughly up to 20 professors were in some way or another involved in Lisp projects. There were people I've seen in real life, often daily. There were many people with deep Lisp knowledge (and this was not even the US). You can bet that none of them used or cared about comp.lang.lisp. Same for the people in the projects and the students.

What you think was "the Lisp community", was just a popular online community of mostly random people, with less impact on what actually happened in the Lisp communities, then you believe.

It seems like our points of view are closer together than I had thought.

I first learned about Lisp because my uncle lent me a Lisp textbook; later, an executive at the company I was working at lent me SICP and exploded my brain. Most actual Lisp users I've met in real life weren't reading comp.lang.lisp either. But it's true that most of my contact with Lisp has been over the internet.

That's because most of my contact with any technical discipline has been over the internet, because almost everyone's has been, for 30 years now. It would be inconceivable to say, 25 years ago, "Most actual Perl users I've met don't read comp.lang.perl.misc," or, "Most actual Python users I've met don't read comp.lang.python," but it was and is true of Lisp. Sharing code and discussions over the internet has been a superpower for the programming-language communities that have managed it, including cross-language communities; I first got to know pg on the Lightweight Languages mailing list, for example. Meanwhile, Lisp users were isolated in the kinds of tiny single-implementation ghettoes you describe, or were collaborating only with other researchers at the same institution.

What I'm pointing to is precisely the fact that comp.lang.lisp was just mostly random people with little impact on what actually happened in Lisp. Every person who might have taken up Lisp, who instead focused on Perl or PHP or Haskell, was a missed opportunity for Lisp to thrive. As with the undiscovered antibiotics resulting from our current pharmaceuticals regulatory regime, the costs are invisible, but staggering. They are the Lispers that weren't born during the 01990s, the Lisps that didn't get finished or even started, the libraries that got written in Perl or JavaScript because Quicklisp and Leiningen didn't exist yet (as far as I can tell, there's still no equivalent for Scheme.)

You're right that trolls like Xah were what made comp.lang.lisp unusable. However, despite the almost 800 lines of code he contributed to Emacs, Naggum was one of them—the worst of all. Those 800 lines are apparently the totality of his public code, and in total they're smaller than some of his individual hate-filled posts to comp.lang.lisp. The period of Naggum's unquestioned domination of the newsgroup was precisely the period during which Usenet was the most important groupware medium. And the practice of establishing dominance by public ridicule didn't end at the boundaries of Usenet; as dang points out above, to this day we still have to combat it in virtually every public discussion of Lisp. That's Naggum's lasting legacy.

Since he became inactive, though, the situation has improved dramatically. We have Arc, Clojure (and Leiningen!), SBCL (which started while Naggum was still active but took years to become popular), the entire Racket empire (now built on the redoubtable Chez compiler), several new "Little" books, miniKANREN, Hy, Quicklisp, R7RS-small, and, as you point out, reasonably functional subreddits. #Lisp on Libera is a pleasant place, and Emacs Lisp and Guile now have native-code compilers. ACL2 and PVS are significant minorities in formal methods. You can even run PDP-1 LISP, or modify and reassemble it with MIDAS.

I would guess that Perl programmers lurking in comp.lang.perl.* 25-30 years ago would have been a tiny minority among all Perl programmers.

I don't think that's true, although maybe you could define "Perl programmers" to include people who downloaded broken, insecure CGI scripts from Matt's Script Archive and made random changes to them until they seemed to work. Even a lot of those people relied on clpm for guidance—often asking questions rather than just lurking. As you can remember, we didn't have Stack Overflow at the time, or even PerlMonks, so clpm was pretty much the main public forum for people to ask questions or announce libraries. Corporate and academic institutions to support Perl basically didn't exist; perl.com was running off Tom Christiansen's home internet connection for several years.

> since he became inactive, though

Again you are digging yourself deeper into this hole. Now I'm really out.

I don't know what "hole" you're talking about. The hole of correctly describing how the Lisp community destroyed itself by permitting Naggum to dominate its public communications, and to some extent has recovered since then?

Perhaps you're implicitly criticizing me for violating some taboo so dreadful you don't dare even to name it; for example, a taboo on speaking ill of the dead. Unfortunately, any truthful accounting of almost any tragic historical events requires willingness to speak ill of the dead, so I'm more than willing to "dig" myself into that "hole". I'd like to invite you to join me here; cowering in fear like that is unworthy of you.

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