Subject: Re: Indentation (please stop) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/07/01 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3139829863048357@naggum.no> * Josef Eschgfaeller <esg@felix.unife.it> | I find this not correct. I did at most propose a different point | of view, I did not defend it so exaggeratedly, and some of you guys | attack me in this way and speak of choice and freedom of expression. | | Was it not you who wrote me last week "I believe education about Lisp | is the most important thing we can do at this time, and hope your | course goes well."? this is actually quite interesting. not only is this guy posting from Italy, he's from outer space. I just _knew_ it was a bad idea to send Lisp into space. here on earth, we appreciate the opportunity to criticize people's actions and have this naïve idea that to err is human, which means that even at the time the action indeed WAS the best thing to do, that quality might not have been fully established from the available information, or some vital information might have been missing, or, as might readily happen, the person was not entirely focused on the particular task at hand and slipped up. none of these faults are personality disorders in humans -- it's how we normally think and act and respond to others. part of the idea is to present views and positions to others and then actually accept input and more information, even if we think we are right to begin with. so if you have been unable to convince humans, it might just be that you have not yet discovered that earthlings are more flawed in this regard than members of your own alien species. | You like it to contradict yourself. If you look a little better at my | earth-shaking 3 lines, you would discover that there is some system. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ you really are visiting this planet only to destabilize the Lisp world, aren't you, and quite literally so, too? this is what we humans call a Freudian slip, named after another nutty guy who might as well have come from outer space himself, considering HIS weird fixation with particular properties of human behavior, too. | I learnt those "> " prefixes on Fidonet - a good school in civilised | written remote distance communication. and this just goes to show that we just gotta be more careful what we send out into space via those satellites. I'll bet they get all confused about who the aliens are in 3rd Rock from the Sun, too. damn! | Not so sure. Read Kant or Cicero or Defoe, and you will find quite long | sentences. It's training. Today young people don't read much and think | that a sentence of three lines is a long one. again, Hollywood and mass marketing and television commercials are not what this planet is about. I'm sorry about sending the wrong signals to your planet, but here on earth, only a tiny minority of young people are similar to what the adults think they look like. maybe the people who make TV shows for dumb kids are also from outer space. it would explain an awful lot. | But I know such stuff by myself, don't you believe that? How do you know | that I never thought about such things? I sympathize. it must be awful to watch us limited humans react only to what you write and not what _you_ know is communicated to the entire galaxy from your telepathic superbrain. we're _ages_ away from actually developing telepathy, you see, so we limit our reactions to what people do and say, and respond to what people do and say, not the entirety of their personality, even though you probably do that on your planet. I remember Robert A. Heinlein using the work "grok" to describe the merging of oneself with knowledge of something else. I hope they don't terminate you just because you have been exposed, but if you do have to go, could you tell the SETI project what to look for? enjoy your stay. and I'm glad Lisp is what attracted the aliens, too. #:Erik -- @1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century