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