Subject: Re: why we aren't using lisp (was New to Lisp) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/06/20 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3138901928902131@naggum.no> * Christopher R. Barry <cbarry@2xtreme.net> -> Klaus Schilling | Maybe if R.M.Stallman had an actual home and a wife and children that he | loved and took good care of instead of only having to feed himself | occasionally and living his life as an atheistic hermit, he might | actually be happy in life, and realize it's okay to be paid money and | have realistic job security for what it takes a lot of intelligence and | hard work to really do properly and an expensive education to really do | professionally. of all the irrelevant drivel that people think criticizes RMS, you'll win the Annual 1999 Lunatic Critic Award for worst ad hominem with special mention of attaching the oh-so-evil label "atheistic" to him, as well. my congratulations! and this mere days after the U.S. Congress voted to help fight crime and gun accidents by posting the Ten Commandments in all public schools. I'm mildly amused by the level of irrationality with which some people meet fundamental problems, and it seems the U.S. will get a lesbian President long before it gets an atheist President... if you want to criticize RMS, know him. (no, that's not "you don't know him, so you can't criticize him", but "know thine enemy".) that way, you won't commit the incredibly embarrassing mistake of attacking him for something he doesn't do wrong and by so doing, prove that you are not attacking RMS, but some monster you have created in your own mind that you try to make people believe is RMS through your _own_ evil ways and propaganda, much like witch hunts or lynch mobs used to prosecute people they didn't like, for entirely different reasons than people got agitated. but since you bring it up, I wonder what kind of family values and religious upbringing people _actually_ have who use them for ad hominem attacks against others who aren't exactly like themselves. like, are Christopher R. Barry's wife and children proud of him for defending them against Richard M. Stallman's atheistic ideas? | No, selling documentation under profitable terms for your software is not | okay with R.M.Stallman, whom last year attacked Tim Oreilly at a | conference he was invited to for not making his documentation "free". he criticized the fact that the sources weren't available, not that the books were sold for a profit. you obviously haven't noticed, but "free" does not refer to price, _only_. consider the meaning of "free" in the two phrases: "the free world" and "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch". now, obviously, people have freedom and objects have prices, so it's counter-productive to call it "free software", when what he's really after is "free programmers". that's valid criticism, however stale by this time. | In many cases, selling only documentation or support or a configuration | tool is not a realistic way to have job security either, ... that isn't one of his points, either. you have obviously not noticed, but the idea is to have people pay for the creation of software, but not for being prohibited from using it, which is what the very prohibitive licenses from companies like Microsoft are all about. striking the right balance between sharing development costs and licensing to consumers is the really tough job here. | He's a lunatic. And you are even more of a lunatic for worshipping him. | If he still liked CL, you would worship it and be flaming all the | schemers. whether the certified lunatic Klaus Schilling worships RMS because he was a Scheme fanatic first or became a Scheme fanatic because RMS wants GUILE to be a Scheme is actually very hard to tell. whether he is more of a lunatic because of worshipping him or picked RMS to worship at random is also very hard to tell. RMS is as plagued by lunatics who worship him as he is plagued by lunatics who criticize him. want my angle on this? RMS' desire for change is non-continuous and cannot be reached incrementally from here, mostly because he rejects any and all continuous and incremental changes. this means it won't happen, no matter what he does. also note that it is _not_ the freeness of Emacs that made it a success, nor was it the freeness of the sources for Linux that made it a success. freeness is not even necessary for success, much less sufficient. how can I say this? because MS-DOS succeeded the same way both Emacs and Linux did: build a community, use community resources to build further. why did the free Mozilla flop? (I haven't heard much about it, but boy did I hear about the release of the sources, so I guess not much has happened.) it had no community, and failed to build it. now, community-building is not predicated on freeness of sources, not even their general availability. you build communities by rewarding people for their contributions and help them retain ownership of their efforts. the curious thing is that free software doesn't actually _do_ that in any meaningful way, and old-timers in the free software world are _extremely_ rare. I'd like critics of RMS to consider a question that might put their hostility towards him and their defense of such issues as "job security" in a new light: who benefits from making job security so expensive? indeed, who benefits from making modern life in general so expensive? once you have thought about it for a while, consider the follow-up questions: why do you defend them? why do you attack those who reject them as lunatics? surely you aren't benefiting yourself, or you wouldn't make the point that job security is so expensive and so hard, would you? it's been said that the unique strength of the human species is that it builds communities to solve problems so large that no individual could even hope to solve any one of them alone. the software crisis appears to me to be a serious lack of community effort to solve our problems, and a bunch of people go off in each their own direction to solve the same old problem for the thousandth if not millionth time. why do C/C++ fools still manually write #include statements and why do Windows fools still write GUIs mostly by hand? why do HTML generators produce so incredibly crappy and verbose files? while mankind creates communities and tries to solve huge problems, programmers are obsessing about the execution time and internal representation of LENGTH on strings, just to take a random sampling from today's set of problems. perhaps the solution to _this_ huge problem in the art of programming is precisely to lose control over source code once created? it is perfectly evident that creating a good language that would save people a lot of effort if they only learned to use it instead of seeing their job security in creating yet another silly new language in order to have people repeat all the previous effort in _their_ particular environment. job security in software didn't use to take much effort: just be a moron, and you could always get re-hired to fix your own bugs, such as the Year 2000 SNAFU. as long as there no point in doing it right the first time, there is no need for a community to help do just that, and therefore, there is no community except where people who _want_ to do it right the first time congregate in their free time. the communities that are "taken over" by the free software people is what professional software people should have had the wherewithal to create long ago, like the medical and legal professions have done. perhaps it's the reckless irresponsibility of the whole industry that is reflected in the fact that people get together in communities on their free time. most other organizations that attract people in their free time are also objections to some perceived chaos. I mean, when Bill Gates can swindle and lie people billions, who wants to be honest and upright except "lunatics"? there's no job security in being ripped off by the better hoodlum. #:Erik -- @1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century