Subject: Re: My opinion re LISP
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: 2000/10/19
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3180979675916712@naggum.net>

* Claire Quilty <cryon@my-deja.com>
| I guess I am this NG's nemesis, in a very mild way.

  _I_ guess you suffer from pathologically inflated self-importance,
  as in delusions of grandeur.  This is what afflicts some people who
  think they are entitled to respect for their joke of an opinion
  simply because they are able to post to USENET.  It used to take
  some guts and something to say to stand up in front of a crowd and
  present one's opinions.  It used to give most people a kind of
  thrill to do that and be recognized.  This was an important part of
  public life in the past.  Today, that feeling of being recognized
  can be brought into existence merely by being an annoying pest like
  you are.  It takes a particularly sad person to feel something good
  after being "recognized" solely for having annoyed others.

  In your own eyes, you think of yourself as a nemesis.  Actually, you
  draw attention only because you are a vacuum.  You are worse than
  nothing when you inflate that nothingness you are into a "namesis"
  by virtue of having annoyed some people into responding to you.

  You are a sick person, even if what you really are is a role-playing
  schmuck who does not even have the guts to use his own identity.

| I really don't know why you keep insisting on calling me a troll.

  It is what your behavior unequivocally tells us you are, with no
  redeeming qualities and very low probably of being wrong about you.
  Adjust your self-perception accordingly, please.

| I just gave my opinion about LISP.

  It is very obvious by now that you did not give an _opinion_.  There
  is very clear evidence in your behavior that you do not even _have_
  an opinion on Lisp.  Opinions are formed in an intellectual process.
  You provide no evidence of such a process having occurred, instead
  quite the opposite: You display a need to get attention that has
  crossed the border between loneliness and mental illness.

  The evidence you continue to provide suggests that you posted what
  you thought would cause others to respond to you in this forum.  To
  call that an _opinion_ is an insult to every sentient being on the
  planet and beyond, yourself just barely included.  What you posted
  and continue to post is a lunatic shriek: "Please notice me!"  You
  _have_ been noticed, you _have_ been seen.  The only problem is,
  this time you have been noticed for what you _are_, not what you
  hoped to be able to pretend to look like: Someone worth listening to.

| I don't like it and I don't like having to learn it.  I have other
| more important things to learn.

  I do not think you are able to learn anything in your stage.  If you
  had more important things to learn, you would just have done it.

| As far as the practical worth of LISP to me as a person, the search
| engine at www.dice.com pretty much tells the whole story:
| 
| C++: 48,000 ads
| Java: 38,000 ads
| LISP: 62 ads
| 
| End of story. LISP loses.

  How many job ads did you find for "President of the United States"?
  I hear it is quite the race to get that job in the U.S. media right
  now.  But there are none, right?  Perhaps counting ads is not the
  best measure of things _really_ important in this world?  Perhaps
  advertising is a means of communicating to losers, the people who do
  _not_ find know what they need, the people who are manipulable into
  purchasing products by constantly insulting their intelligence and
  overwhelming their mental capacity with ideals and imagery and
  pictures of desirable models and lifestyles they would have no hope
  of getting close to except if they buy that product which associates
  them with the unreachable and unattainable.  Or in other words, how
  many big ads did your significant other (assuming you have one) put
  out in order for you to find her?  Which _mass_market_ did you go to
  in order to find love and companionship?  Or did you not?  Perhaps
  the _mass_market_ is not where anyone else goes for the most valued
  elements of their life, either?  Perhaps making the mass market big
  is reserved for a _very_ small fraction of the products out there?
  Perhaps the remaining products are those that really _count_?
  
  Or perhaps you _are_ the kind of person that TV commercials effect
  into buying products.  That would explain a _lot_.  It would also
  explain why you think of yourself as so important that everybody
  should care about your opinion: Advertising exaggerates your life
  into something slightly fantastic.  The advertising world's view of
  your life and life on this planet in general is one in which you,
  the consumer, are suddenly taking part in the lives of movie stars,
  public figures, etc, simply by doing something they do, except you
  have to pay a little to do what they get paid lots to do.  So you
  think that just because you can post to the Net, like so many real
  people do, you are a real person.  Because you can post what might
  pass for an opinion if everyone were comatose, like many important
  people can post real opinions, you become an important person, too.

  Why on earth did you do something so personally revealing about your
  personality and your views on life, values, even _yourself_ as you
  did counting those ads?  Did you not realize what you were telling
  people when you did that?  What kind of _basis_ for your opinions do
  you think you communicate by that choice of metric and method?  How
  can anyone trust an ad-counter to think for himself?  How could
  anyone who thinks the number of ads he finds is an indicator of
  anything at all form an independent _opinion_?  Such a person is a
  product of the ads he has seen, nothing more and nothing less, so
  why should we listen to such a _product_ rather than to the _cause_
  of these ads?  Counting job ads to determine future success is like
  determining which is the better company to work for by counting the
  number of people they lay off.  The fewer ads, the less desperate.

  And why do you think you had anything _new_ to bring to a forum by
  counting ads?  Whose intelligence do you think you reduced the most
  by pretending we did not already know what only you could bring this
  forum with those ad counters: Ours or your own?

  I have one piece of advice for you, "Claire Quilty": Learn to think.
  Whatever it is you are doing now, it is not learning because it does
  not involve any thinking.

  Finally, you do not need to thank me for giving you more attention
  than you could ever have hoped for.  It was a pleasure.  I assume
  you did _not_ enjoy it, but that is what happens when people get
  what they ask for and they do not have the smarts to ask for what
  they would be happy to get.  Now, go think, and be quiet for a while.

#:Erik
-- 
  I agree with everything you say, but I would
  attack to death your right to say it.
				-- Tom Stoppard