Subject: Re: MS Win32 CommonLisp From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2001 02:20:11 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3207867576668285@naggum.net> * "David L. Greene" <David.L.Greene@home.com> > I have been trying to find a real MSWin editor that uses lisp the way GNU > Emacs or XEmacs does. These to editors are arcane and completely out of > date. Um, this indicates a certain lack of investment in effort on your part. You have indicated up front (thank you) that you are committed to the Microsoft Weltanschauung, but the part of that commitment that I will not accept or respect is that the rest of the world is wrong or that just because it requires new investment on your part, that it is misdesigned. You have _had_ to invest a tremendous amount of effort to grow into the Microsoft Weltanschauung, but going about it like a Borg discovering Unix is not conducive to your own development and happiness with Common Lisp. > I can't remember when I had to use dir *.* to find a file. Which appears > to be the way *Emacs works. The keyword here is "appears". Just because you see a directory listing does not mean your old scars have to be reopened and the Borg implants have to be inserted all over again. > Never mind the whacky file dialog. I am quite sure that our excellent hospitality does not suffer from this. You are quite welcome to insult what you do not know in order to ask for help in becoming more used to it. Why, lots of tourists behave that way. Few of them stay, but that is mostly because they really never left home. > I realize that these may be fighting words in this group but, as much as > I will probably be screamed at for saying it. Well, contrary to your premature, prejudicial, and counterproductive opinionating, _lots_ of Common Lisp people work with Windows these days. You are not addressing a frigging "group", you are addressing _people_. I realize that this may be hard for you Microsoft Borgs, but outside of Redmond, WA, there is this thing called "individuals" that you can talk to one on on one and who are not linked with the whole bloody Collective. > It is a fact these apps are arcane and out of date. Oh, Christ, you do not even know the difference between your own value judgements and facts. Well, no wonder you are a Microsoft drone. > If UNIX users and programmers feel that MSWin should rightly be ignored > as a viable and real OS then ignore this message. People who actually know how to use a system productively actually manage to use it productively. Did that trivial fact shock you? It should not, but it sounds like you needed to hear the obvious. You see, your lack of knowledge is no match for their superior skills when to comes to making statements about suitability. > For all intents and purposes LISP is nonexistent in MSWin and therefore > difficult to support. Well, well, well. The tourist certainly knows a lot! Why, is he really here to ask questions and perhaps learn something? No, no, no! _Our_ excellent tourist is here to complain about the food and drop his cigarette butts on the street and he thinks every girl he sees is included in the package-deal with the cheap hotel he also dislikes. LOOK AROUND, YOU DIMWIT! IF YOU ASK QUESTIONS, WAIT FOR THE ANSWER! > I WANT TO USE LISP NOT UNIX!!!!!! I think that line would sound great in one of those televised diaper ads, but that is probably because I think those ads are secretly funded by population control centers, abortion clinics, and companies who sell contraceptives. > From what I have used of it it blows away all other languages. Yes, it does. Lisp even makes it possible for _individuals_ who are not part of the Borg Collective to enter the world of Microsoft and still be productive, although working at about half their normal speed even after a year of "assimilation". It would have been impossible for _me_ to survive working with Windows if it were not for Common Lisp, but once I got it installed, and Emacs, too, I was actually able to work with much the same productivity as on real computers. (You _asked_ for this snide remark, if you are not quite fully aware of your own behavior, OK?) > What is out there that is a real MSWin app that I can write apps in LISP? Oh, man! He says "app", but at least his spelling is reasonabaly OK. > UNIX users will have no idea what I'm talking about, and I know this > message will get me screamed at. It is your insulting, demeaning, idiotic assumption that Unix users will have no idea what you are talking about that that gets you screamed at, if anything. Unix users _are_ much smarter than Windows users, so they know both worlds. (They sort of have to, consider the massive lack of skills and intelligence in the Windows world.) Just because _you_ know only one world does not mean that anyone else suffers from the same mental retardation and slow uptake of contrary information that you do. > I hope that someone is listening. To what? Another pathetic tourist who cannot figure out which way to hold the map? Gimme a break. Here, let me show you the wonderful Egress. > The only reason that I'm not running a UNIX pc now is because of the UNIX > world bickering about a shrink wrap version in the early '90's when IBM, > Microsoft, Various UNIX vendors were in a horse race to get a 32bit > shrink wrap OS to market At that time Microsoft had NO advantage. Oh, Christ, take it up with your shrink and get over it. > MSWin won. Right. There was but a _single_ race for all the computing needs of all of mankind. It has been completed and the results are in. There are to be no more races, no evolving computing needs, no more development and -- what was that word, again? -- no more innovation. You know, or, well, of course you don't, but this is a true story about marketing, so you might learn something about marketing and winning wars. Pepsi once figured out that people consistently liked small sips of Pepsi better than they liked small sips of Coca-Cola. Now, Pepsi is of course so sweet and yucky that you could kill with it, but you never notice that if you only drink small sips of it. Coca-Cola had long ago figured out that the best way to keep their customers is to make them want another bottle when they finish the one they started out with. Pepsi did not have a chance, because once people taste the Real Thing, you simply do not switch to some oversugared syrupy gunk. The question before the Borg of Marketing (or vice versa) is now: How to lie about this convincingly? It was brilliant! Stage tasting competitions. When your mouth is full of all sorts of weird stuff, a dose of extra sweet-tasting sugar does you well. That is, after all, why people eat candy. So if you gave people a choice between a slightly bitter, great-tasting elixir and some candy on a bottle, they would say the candy tasted better. Of course it did, and it is in fact true. A small plastic cup of Coca-Cola does nobody any good, but apparently, a small plastic cup of Pepsi does. The giant lie was that people who liked small plastic cups of liquid candy would not want to buy a 32-pack of 16oz bottles of the great elixir and guzzle it down with lasting satisfaction and increased loyalty. This was a hard lie to fight, because it was true: People preferred liquid candy in small doses, but then again, it would not be all that smart marketing to tell people that Coca-Cola had optimized _heavily_ for repeat purchase -- that is the kind of thing that gets nicotine pushers into serious trouble. Pepsi won on the meta-level: They removed focus from how great the _last_ drop out of your bottle tastes to how great the _first_ drop out of your bottle testes. Setting the stage, they could make people believe in their lie. The proof of that was that to fight this lie, Coca-Cola tried to come up with something that would win on the stage set by Pepsi, and taste better in small plastic cups to people who liked liquid candy. As we all know, it was a _major_ disaster. Fully optimized for that first- drop experience, where it did fare much better, it was godawful and you could barely keep from recycling the bottle contents faster than the bottle if you tried to down it all. They lost their loyal following on phony Pepsi's stage, but recanted and brought back the real thing amidst much furor and sense of betrayal, but what people remember is not what they _should_ remember: the _Pepsi_ people are bastards, not for tricking Coca-Cola into losing lots of money, but for being such a shallow bunch that they actually thought first impressions would be _all_ that anyone would ever care about. Now, there is much success to be had in the first impressions business. Microsoft has built virtually its entire world dominance (heehee) on first impressions, or actually _future_ first impressions -- it is your _next_ first impression of the _next_ version of Microsoft Fraud 8.0 that will be so massively great you wish you had a whole pint of cold Coke to get rid of the bad taste of oversweetness. If _all_ you are into is first impressions, you will remain a tourist no matter where you go and no matter what you do. If you are interested in settling down with anything at all, building loyalty or communities or > Like it or hate it they won. What Microsoft "won" was your personal integrity. You actually _believe_ that there was a fight, that everybody took part in it, that Microsoft came out on top, and that everybody else are now losers. Microsoft "won" a war of _unbelievably_ dirty marketing where the idea was not to win anything at all in the actual fights, but to set the stage so they could trick people, just like Pepsi did, into believing that _other_ companies should be competing about _their_ first-impressions charade. Microsoft has won exactly nothing. They are really good at marketing. If their great teacher, Joseph Goebbels, had been able to learn from them instead of the other way around, the world would have a slightly more sinister ruler today than Bill Gates. Microsoft is under really serious threat from Linux, which in my opinion has as its main impetus the vision of the fall of Microsoft in the near future. Nobody in their right mind would donate so much effort for free if it did not have a very tangible reward in front of them. Microsoft has, through its massively fraudulent practices and its evil, rivaling both the Evil Empire and the Third Reich in propaganda and self-serving misinformation, set itself up as The Great Enemy. Bill Gates, the neurotic nerd, is so hysterically paranoid in his competitiveness that his only self-defense mechanism is to grab ever _more_ control over other people instead of trying to grow a clue and get the very simple idea that that is precisely why he is _losing_. The key to relinquishing Microsoft's control over your life is to realize that you do not have to accept their paranoid competitiveness. Companies do not "win" major fights the way Microsofts wants you to believe they do. Everything survives and thrives for a while if it is good, and then it dies. They key is to get more out of what you do than you put in, overall, but if you would not _accept_ 75% failure, you are quite simply insane, influenced beyond repair by the Borg of Marketing who have been pushing "success" and "winning" for decades. To do well and stay sane, you need to make enough on the things you do well that you can afford not to do everything only sufficiently well to get by. Microsoft's paranoid competitiveness is a result of a personal philosophy that mediocrity can "win" if it fights hard and long enough, but mediocrity can _never_ win. Only people who are willing and _able_ to fail can win big. Bill Gates is so _personally_ mortally afraid of losing that he _had_ to become the most _brutal_ and most _dishonest_ leader in the world. Read his boring yet revealing books -- not only does he not have more genuinely new ideas than my cat, he is a poster boy for mediocrity gone bad. He is not that smart, either -- he is just out to compete with and screw people and he became _really_ good at it because it is not something good people want to become good at. Bill Gates is what happens when a criminal, bad mind does not get into _enough_ trouble in its youth. Unfortunately, his exceptionally evil character is contagious. People are no longer happy to make money, they must "win". Instead of being good at what they do and better at it than their competition, they must instead beat their competition senseless with propaganda, false moves, ridiculous release schedules for vaporware, etc. The result is that nobody who _could_ be really good at anything want to work with such people. The computer business has become an arena for ridiculous hype much worse than the movie industry or the car industry. It permeates every level, down to the lowly programmer who hates VB and feels that he has somehow "lost" because the behemoth has "won". But it is simply not true. So many computer people believe that in order to get work, they have to have skill X. It is as if the world suddenly saw a need for plumbers and _everyone_ wanted to become a plumber. The only way to make that happen would be to make a disastrously evil design in the public infrastructure so that you would _need_ a billion plumbers. Now, who would do that? What kind of person would want to create a world that was so broken that it needed fixing all the time? The revengeful, hateful, paranoid, hyper-competitive nerd with more psychopathic and antisocial personality disorders than you could document in a lifetime: Bill Gates, and for what reason? Nothing more than that he himself can make a buck on other people's misery. Now, good people make money on other people's desire for something better, too, but there is a difference between he who profits on a misery he makes sure remains and he who profits on the misery the misery he removes. The latter I can work with, and I would not care all that much if the misery was a lie, either -- getting out of any sort of misery is just great. But the former -- the kind of person who makes sure that people _hope_ for something better they never get, who tell them that they _ought_ to live in misery but that he is making it "easier" for them (a.k.a. "computers are so hard to use, so you have to use this retarded GUI I have developed to make it harder and slow you down and never realize that I am lying through my teeth to you, but at least I tell you it will make it easier, and so do all these important people who also think computers are too hard for the idiot masses, as they would lose billions of dollars and lots of political power if a lot of people woke up"), who tell them that they cannot be _expected_ to deal with the real issues, but have to deal with some moron version, those are much better off dead. Unfortunately, they know it. Bad people _know_ they are bad people. It is good people who are always racked by doubt and personal problems. Bad people are bad people because they do not care, and the one person who cares the least on this planet is Bill Gates. The worst part of Microsoft's marketing strategy, however, is, just like Pepsi's self-defeating first-impressions-only game (I am sure you will say that Coca-Cola has "won"), that we have reduced all evaluation of computer needs and solutions to first impressions and what some may consider "user-friendliness" but which is really "skill-defeating" to the point where _you_ have serious emotional issues with learning new tools, even though you want to get out of a situation you admit to hate. What do you expect? That somebody will magically change the world for you? If so, it is the attitude that made Microsoft possible. Like a sweet first taste and impression, Microsoft lured you into drinking the whole bottle of Pepsi, and of course you are sick to your stomach from it, but since you think that first impressions are what counts, you cannot fathom that they do not count at all. Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO! is the answer. > Is LISP on the same road? No. > Is it so tied to the OS that it can't cross over? *laugh* Lisp has never been tied to any operating system. > I HATE BASIC!!!! I USE BASIC EVERYDAY!!!!! Awwww. Give the man a Pepsi. > We are still early in the overall history of what will be the > WorldWideWeb. LISP is HIGHLY appropriate for this medium, which is why I > have a renewed interest, but it has to be EASILY(use, not the act of > downloading) available in the LEADING OS in the industry. Like that OS > or hate it. Check out some other vendor than Microsoft. Prepare to have your mind explode, as your incredibly perverted view of what the world looks like will probably be in for a really serious blow. There are many serious offerings of really high-quality Common Lisp products for Windows. Now, let's sit back and see how you blow up. This could be fun. But surprise us all and show that you can actually _think_, and maybe some Lisp people will help you figure out what your _real_ needs are. ///