Subject: Re: Lisp in the "real world" From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1997/07/02 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.scheme Message-ID: <3076832127801019@naggum.no> * Martin Rodgers | It appears that some Lisp people are rather hostile to this platform, and | are unwilling to discuss the _technical_ issues. I see. you actually think you discuss technical issues. that's pretty amazing, considering that you don't include anything constructively technical in any of your messages at all. tell you what, Martin, if you had discussed technical issues, this thread would have run to its completion in February 1996, and you would have the ability to create DLLs in a Lisp you could afford to buy. the fact is, however, that _you_ don't know enough about creating DLLs to help anybody who could have done it. (IF you had known, you would have shared of this knowledge to help fulfill your actual wishes, instead of whining for month upon month that you don't get what you want. if you actually DO know how to create DLLs, but keep going with your whining, you're more destructive than I thought possible, so in the interest of being generous, I disregard that possibility.) | The political issues should be irrelevant. The Lisp vendors I've asked | about this have replied to me in a much more civilised manner, and I | appreciate that. hm. you know what? if you call a company with a really stupid question or being incredibly annoying, whoever answers can reply to you in a civilized manner because they can share the experience with their colleagues as soon as they hang up. this is one of the great benefits of having large rooms of support people answering phones. this is why going out to lunch was invented. it's very important to relieve stress, and having to deal with people like you sure is stressful. if I were to answer a phone call from you, I would be civilized to your face, too. if I worked for a Lisp vendor, I would, however, insist that you help me solve the problem in a constructive way, I would probably request a purchase order for the product whenever it was finished, and I would probably also ask for funding to get the job done in a timely fashion if you were in a hurry. _then_ it would be a professional relationship between me and you, and you would be paying me to be civilized to you on the phone, too. also, it doesn't take much to be civilized to somebody on the phone if no commitments are made, no plans are altered, no costs incurred (except the wasted time of the one person answering the phone and those he tells afterwards). what _does_ take real effort and goodwill is to be generous and civilized to people who make destructive noises about Lisp vs the "real world" in a crowd of thousands. your goodwill account is seriously overdrawn, Martin, and that's why I get seriously hostile to you when you don't quit being annoying. you could rectify your goodwill account by publishing _technical_ details necessary for somebody to, like, change a WinMain to a LibMain function instead of being an annoying asshole by asking others to "prove" to you they know some idiotic arcana of Windows. consider this: if you asked somebody on the phone to prove the same to you the way you do it here, they would hang up and refuse to take more calls from you, IF they were civilized. if they were not civilized, or the civilized veneer cracked, I sure wouldn't want to be you. | I believe that I'm just being realistic. Perhaps if I were being truely | realistic, I might listen to the people who tell me to use something | other than Lisp, instead of looking for ways to convince them that Lisp | can solve their problems. let's see. you would like us to infer that you are using Lisp, not something other than Lisp, but Lisp cannot be used in your world, because the DLL is the sine qua non of software development and no Lisp can build DLLs. this contradiction must mean that you are _in_fact_ using something other than Lisp, and it is obviously impossible successfully to convince anybody that Lisp can solve their problems when Lisp can't solve their problems because Lisp lacks the sine qua non. this means that all the evidence presented can only suggest that Martin Rodgers would _like_ people to believe he uses Lisp and has a real problem that he desperately needs solved, but what people who read his rants carefully _actually_ believe is that Martin Rodgers does not know Lisp, does not use Lisp, does not intend to use Lisp, and even if he wanted to and tried, his boss (who must have _some_ brains even though he hired Martin, because he finds my articles entertaining) would turn down his desire to buy a professional version of a commercial Lisp that could create DLLs. who do you think you're kidding? why do you insist upon wasting other people's time so much? more importantly, who do I waste my time with you? (the answer is obvious, actually. when I got back to reading comp.lang.lisp after a few weeks of absence, as much as 90% of the articles contained whining about Windows or followups to whining about Windows. if this is what Windows does to people, I have one more reason to avoid it. when I'm faced with a serious irritant, I try to remove it -- be that Windows or Windows fanatics. I don't know whether I have actually succeeded in removing Martin Rodgers' incessant whining, but I _have_ removed the irritant as far as _I'm_ concerned. and I doubt that anybody else is reading this, anyway, so the danger of having annoyed any third party in the process is slim.) #\Erik -- if DUI is "Driving Under the Influence" then GUI must be "Graphics Under the Influence"