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Comp.lang.lisp on Clojure

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23 pointsparenthesis16 comments

Yeah ... comp.lang.lisp ... that group has turned into a huge flame fest where actual discussions about the language are rare. Very sad.

The group is dominated by a small group of agressive and rude hardcore lisp programmers who turn most (innocent) questions and discussions from newbies into language flamewars and personal insults.

It is very unfortunate. When I was playing with common lisp about a year go I got more info from the group's archives from the late 80 and early 90s than from those folks who are there now.

cll has been this way for as long as I can remember. Erik Naggum was around a lot more back then, and he was just as bad as these guys.

[Edit: by "bad" I mean he clearly knew what he was talking about, and was irate that people didn't always see it his way. He never did give someone some code to delete all the files on their hard drive though.]

An old Lisper told me his opinion that Naggum almost singlehandedly destroyed the CL community, by being both so smart and so noxious that his behavior became a sort of local standard.

On another note, Dan Weinreb has been actively working to create a renewed, less dysfunctional CL community. Which reminds me that I really ought to find a way to contribute to that.

http://www.lispforum.com/ should be friendlier.

All the active lispers who are producing useful software not actually writing in cll; you're much better off finding them in the gmane mailinglists.

Which mailinglists?

the MLs for any of the software/projects that you need help with. For the language itself, #lisp is both immediate and mild.

That lovely business about "code to delete all the files on their hard drive" is from this cll thread, from June 2006 (it's in msg #4, with the justification in msg #8):

http://bit.ly/ta8Ni

There is certainly something not 100% with this Pascal Bourguignon guy. Also see this recent thread where that Lisp attitude spills over to the objective-c newsgroup.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.objective-c/browse_...

Unfortunately,the objective-c group has had all sorts of trolls from the days of some nitwit writing a version of the language and saying NeXT's wasn't valid (even though NeXT actually owned the trademark).

I program in Common Lisp every day and almost never read cll. It's like walking through a bad neighborhood. I do agree with you about the archives being valuable.

To be fair, the list was regularly trolled by people posing as noobs asking innocent questions. The biggest weakness of the Common Lisp community, the eagerness to personally solve any and every problem with Lisp code (instead of thinking, "Damn, why should I have to do this?") made cll a great place to get help if you had a clearly non-trollish question. It's too bad the trolls trained the cll regulars to react aggressively against noob questions.

Sounds just like comp.lang.javascript.

Clojure is a Lisp, no question about it. And an excellent one at that.

But one has to remember that Common Lisp was created under a forced consensus. Several Lisp vendors and communities were brought under one roof and told to amalgamate their Lisps and standardize NOW, or they couldn't do business with the U.S. government. Many many people had to fight over what to keep and what to leave, vendors had to give up their competitive edge, systems were broken, and after 10 years of polishing and improvements the modern Common Lisp was born.

Take the cover of CLtL2 and look at the list of authors. The who's who of Lisp. If you go out there and invent a new dialect, negligently ignoring what came before, refusing to consider an standard core + your own vendor extensions, breaking what makes Lisp Lisp, like syntax, and even side stepping other Free Lisps that existed the day you started and were solving the same problem .. then don't be troubled if you're not met with a cheering crowd and greeted as a liberator.

This is still going on?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=490216

Someone there claimed it becomes resolved at about message 255. I found it tediously slow to get to that screen (BTW: is there a way to jump ahead in google groups, or do you really have to click "next" 10 times (jumps 25 each time)? The URL is a hashkey that doesn't have explicit parameters.)

So here's the URL for messages 251- 275: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/...

The last message was posted about one month after the first post.

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