Subject: Re: I'm outta here...
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 02:26:05 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3214866361054904@naggum.net>

* Rajappa Iyer
| Why let anyone drive you out of the newsgroup?

  Because he lost the fight he chose to pick, of course.  The worst losers
  always have to announce their withdrawal from the forum in which they
  have chosen to embarrass themselves beyond shame, rather than try to do
  something less embarrassing.  That is _why_ they are losers.  If they had
  had any notion of constructive use of the forum they leave, they would
  simply have done something constructive, instead of only telling _others_
  what to do when they cannot do it themselves.

  Nobody drove him out of the newsgroup.  Such "passiveness" is typical of
  people who cannot take charge of their own situation and fix whatever
  they do not like -- be it the "tone" in a newsgroup or a feature in a
  language -- it has to be somebody else's fault, and the more they "refuse
  to fix it", the more they can believe in conspiracies and bad people who
  make their lives miserable.  This is the way of the loser.  He has, in
  fact, _full_ control over his own actions and he could simply have quit
  posting his insane drivel, lies, and attacks.  He himself suggested he do
  that, but when he failed to keep his word (again, it was somebody else's
  fault), he chooses to make a stink and slam the door on his way out,
  believing that this would not be considered the ultimate act of cowardice.

  Now, Treat John Foderaro like an adult, not the child he appears to be.
  He does _not_ deserve anyone's pity for not being able to control himself
  and just do what he says and demands of others.  He has been using stupid
  intimidation techniques to "win" by destroying his opponents, but nobody
  wins that way.  You win a debate by being smarter than your opponent, not
  by being more stupid.  If somebody says something hurtful, it may create
  a sense of satisfaction to take revenge, but nothing has happened to that
  which hurt.  Idiots seek personal revenge.  Mature people seek justice.
  Smart people seek to understand and to outsmart their critics.  If you
  love Google like he does, check out how he treats people who makes _any_
  argument against his beliefs.  "That is *your* opinion" is just not a
  grown man's reaction to honest concern, and callling people who disagree
  with him a "cult" and "religious" is simply not something you do if you
  have a working brain and actually want to participate in a technical
  forum.  Why is this man the Chief Scientist at a major Common Lisp vendor?

  John Foderaro abused this forum to further his personal agendas, one of
  which is to undermine the ANSI CL standard, which was _supposed_ to be
  our common point of agreement, but which he has rejected.  John Foderaro
  has rejected this forum just as he has rejected Common Lisp, and _that_
  he did long before the standard was finalized.  His inability to convince
  a committee of really smart people to use lower-case symbol names (which
  would have been a really good idea), for instance, has been eating him up
  since before Common Lisp the Language was published in 1984 and he was
  not a member of the committee that produced the ANSI standard.  Why?
  Because it has _never_ been a technical issue to him that he could get
  reasonable people to agree with him on.  If it had been, I am certain the
  committee would have found ways to accomodate him beyond readtable-case
  and :invert, but you do not get people to work towards your goals if you
  call them "braindamaged" in working relationships.  It has become clear
  to me while trying to work with John Foderaro that certain things are not
  subject to solution: He _prefers_ to be griping about them forever rather
  than solve them in a compatible way.  This is _exactly_ what we have seen
  from him in this newsgroup.  For instance, readtables were added to the
  language in 1989, but not fully supported in Allegro CL until 2000.  This
  is the kind of thing in the standard that would have accomodated what he
  said he wanted and would have let people use a case-sensitive Common Lisp
  reader if they wanted to, but instead of this, they got set-case-mode, an
  ancient tool which works by _converting_ all the symbol names in the
  entire Lsp image, and which did not let people mix "modern mode" with
  readtable-case functionality until another engineer at Franz Inc did the
  work at my persistent request.  I believe that John Foderaro is as much
  an impediment to conformance in Franz Inc products as he is a detractor
  from community acceptance of the standard in this group.

  Now, for six months, if you believe that, we can work together, knowing
  that at least one fewer stupid jerk will waste our time quibbling over
  non-issues and going postal when somebody does not accept his hostile
  comments towards the foundation for the community.  No other programming
  language community has been subject to such rampant idiocy after they had
  achieved a standard.  People have either left the process or accepted the
  defeat and moved on with their lives -- griping about a failure to get a
  committee to agree with you is simply not worth decades of anger.  The
  end result is that those who have stayed have been _enthusiastic_ about
  the standard.  Somehow, the Common Lisp community has not achieved that
  level of community agreement about _its_ standard, and the person _most_
  responsible for this is John Foderaro, who has also been such a clear and
  present danger of filibustering and making serious problems in case we
  reopen the standard that it probably will never happen.  If people have
  tired of John Foderaro in this newsgroup, imagine what he will do when a
  committee does not agree with him.  If he could not get over upper-case
  symbol names in 15 years, nobody should expect that he does after a new
  committee vote on the matter.  When I made a point out of what I wanted
  from my Common Lisp vendor, it was precisely to ask John Foderaro (and
  Franz Inc by extension) to grow up and realize that he was hurting the
  community with his negative attitude towards what the community had
  already agreed upon.  If he does not accept that, he should simply find
  another community -- not that I think there is room for it -- or create
  one, but _not_ under the name Common Lisp.  The Open Source stuff he
  posts (which I do not trust enough to use and think looks like some
  ancient pre-Common Lisp that has little to do with good, modern Common
  Lisp style) is an attempt to build a new community to his own liking, but
  what I really do not understand is what attraction _Common_Lisp_ has to
  him when it is so braindamaged and stupidly designed as he claims.  Most
  of us can always find something we hate about something big and useful,
  but smart people figure out how to live with it in a constructive way.
  It appears that his griping about these misfeatures is his raison d'être,
  or at least for staying in the Common Lisp community.  Several trolls in
  comp.lang.lisp have shared this personality disorder and cannot live
  without complaining about something.  Six months without each of them
  would really be nice.  One less troll is a good thing.

///
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