Subject: Re: Lisp advocacy (Was Re: another take on "C is faster than lisp")
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 14 Sep 1994 00:19:42 UT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <19940914T001942Z.erik@naggum.no>

[Cyber Surfer]

|   We can see the same behaviour for operating systems, hence the advocacy
|   newsgroups for OS/2, Windows, and perhaps others, but I can't remember.
|   I never read them, as I have far better things to do! I've noticed that
|   opinions rarely if ever change as a result of debating on UseNet, or
|   any other place.

just to second Jeff Dalton on this one.  between two debaters, nothing may
appear to change, but as soon as you consider the "lurkers", and consider
the e-mail that either participant receives, it is obvious that opinions
change all over the world from a debate involving strong factual points,
even flamefests have positive effects even far removed from USENET itself.

don't be tricked into believing that USENET is only those who post here
because those are the only ones you see.  to take one example: Norwegian
politicians recently have referred to statements that have been expressed
on USENET about electronic availability of the text of our laws.  if this
is not changing people's opinions, I don't know what would be!  note that
they don't post followups.

#<Erik>
--
Microsoft is not the answer.  Microsoft is the question.  NO is the answer.