Subject: Re: the "loop" macro From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2001 14:30:03 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3208084196391200@naggum.net> * John Foderaro <jkf@unspamx.franz.com> > First I always speak for myself. I actually _believe_ you think you do. Which is kind of scary. > Second did you miss Erik's points: > 1. I shouldn't be allowed to distribute code that uses a macro that's not > part of Common Lisp. Franz should 'clean up' the code by automatically > rewriting the code to include only CL macros and special forms. Seems to me that you try to speak for me both now and repeatedly previously. You do not recognize this, do you? > 2. I can think ill of Common Lisp macros and special forms but I > shouldn't put those thoughts down on a web page where people can read it. > To him to criticize less than one percent of Common Lisp is to criticize > one hundred precent of it and to seek it's downfall. This sure looks like you try to speak for me, too. Do you fail to understand what you are saying both directly and indirectly? This incredibly stupid and dishonest manipulation that you engage in fails because most people in this newsgroup are probably smarter than you are and figure out _exactly_ what you are trying to do. > If you feel that way too, and I very much doubt you do, then you are a > zealot as well. Why is it important to you that whoever says something is a zealot? I think this quote from your own material speaks for itself: Why do I argue against ideas I don't like rather than make it personal and argue against specific people? There are a number of reasons. First I feel there's a lot more content if you stick to ideas rather than hurling childish insults. I think we have sufficient evidence to conclude that you are unable to separate fact and fiction and neither do you actually understand how much you are hurling childish insults and show that you are _preoccupied_ with arguing against specific people. The most interesting point for me, however, is watching how you squirm away from the real issues. It is _impossible_ that you could have failed to grasp what I have said. It is unthinkable that you do not understand that I have directly linked your unprofessional behavior to Franz Inc's loss of business and I believe that your continued employment with Franz Inc is detrimental to the survivability of Allegro CL, but _still_ you continue to argue as if you have a "right" to create new macros and "criticize" the standard, _neither_ of which have been substantially challenged by anyone other than your whining self. All in all, you leave me the impression of a mentally ill person who has lost all relevant contact with reality and have shut itself in a world where people are trying to prevent him from doing something reasonable when in fact nobody is preventing that, they are trying to stop you from doing real damage to people because of the way you work to destroy the community consensus-building processes of which you are, by your very own admission, not party. You also missed the point entirely, which is hardly surprising, about why Franz Inc should remove IF* from its published code: It is because it is professional of a serious company to keep its mentally ill "artists" away from the public in exactly the same way several publishing houses have and continue to accept the most insane behavior from its authors as long as they can correct their idiosyncrasies of spelling and grammar in print. If Franz Inc continues to publish IF*, it is not selling a Common Lisp implementation, it is selling the works of an insane artist, the same way an author who insists on a variant spelling is selling his deviant spelling in preference to whatever ideas he wanted to express. I am forced to assume that you do not understand this analogy at all. Let me make that analogy more concrete. Suppose you think that the verb "be" is broken and that it should be a regular verb. You write all your documentation and correspondence with your more elegant version, publish a "grammar standard" which explains why "be" is broken by design and why people should avoid it like the plague and instead use your simple and elegant be*, and you rant and rave against the complex grammar of English and lie about there being no other languages with a complex "be" verb. If this does not make you look stark raving mad, I do not know what would. Now, your employer has a potential contract with a client and the client looks at your documentation and wonders why you have devised your own verb, at which point you decide that this is a good time to argue against the stupid English language and its gratuitous complexity. The client is very professional and asks you whether this opinion of yours will impact their software, which among other things will contain a natural language module and wisely asks for a demonstration. The natural language module has a bug because you think "be" is broken by design and it fails to make an important grammatical distinction. The client asks you to fix this bug because they are not interested in your superior version of English. You get very, very upset about this and rant and rave about your rights to create your own verbs being infringed and clearly "be" _is_ broken! The very professional client interprets this as meaning that it is more important to you to keep your own verb than to do business with them, and prepares to leave, at which point you call them "grammar zealots" and slam the door, screaming to anryone you meet that your right to criticize the English language is under attack and someone wants to stop your improvements to the language. I believe the esteemed readership of this newsgroup will appreciate that the deranged lunatic I have just described is a _fair_ depiction of John Foderaro. Suppose the deranged lunatic can do really useful work. A professional employer would find ways to make use of the deranged lunatic, but would ensure that none of the official company correspondence use the lunatic's private verbs, that none of the documentation does, and that the lunatic is kept under lock and key and does not harm the professional impression of the company in the public eye. Provided that they can afford to have someone go over the lunatic's useful work and clean it up, this might make business sense. It does manifestly _not_ make business sense to keep the lunatic employed in a position where he causes serious damage to the company's public profile and image. It would be _suicidal_ for a company to let this person loose on its clients, however professional they be. Demanding that all customers put up with the lunatic before they can purchase the product is simply not a good business plan. And, yes, there _are_ serious bugs in Allegro CL that come directly from John Foderaro's _unwillingness_ to implement the specification correctly and months, even years, of asking for fixes have gone unanswered, as are my suggested fixes. I have been bitten by them several times, probably because I am a zealot who also _knows_ the standard so well that I use more of it than most people. For all its excellent support of "real" customer needs, you can just forget any support from Franz Inc if John Foderaro filters the bug report and decides the bug is in ANSI CL, and if you raise a conformance issue, you can easily get interrogated on your supposed "real" need and are suggested work-arounds instead of getting a "yes, sir, right a way, sir!" response that a responsible vendor of a product that has a well-known, published _specification_ to work from should respond with. After all, conformance to the specification is the _baseline_ for all customer satisfaction. If you cannot trust the product to conform to an extremely high-quality specification, how can you trust that it does what the vendor says it does? Conformance is thus not an end in itself -- it is a means to establish trust in the vendor's ability to do a complete and professional job and to act responsibly in the face of a requirements document. Instead, what I get from people at Franz Inc when I raise this issue is that they cannot commit to ANSI CL because it is a moving target, that anyone can change it, etc. The fact that it is a version of a standard that is never going to change -- there might be new versions, but not changes -- does not penetrate or register. The fact that I use this standard as a reference for correct behavior the same way I use their manuals for their additions does not register -- I should use Franz Inc manuals for everything and not require any objective measures of conformance. Franz Inc used to be much better than they are now about this. Then they hired another dangerous lunatic who argued strongly against conformance because he actually _believed_ that that would make the product _less_ responsive to user needs and this person poisoned my relationship with the company and very efficiently shut down my "better conformance" drive. That nutball was fired as I understand it, and good riddance, but the effects of his destructiveness lingers, and John Foderaro has picked up all of his bitterness and venom towards the standard and the committe and has continued to destroy my trust in Franz Inc's ability to _ever_ get around to fix hundreds of minor conformance bugs, which they no longer even document or keep track of. Then there's the weird shit they do with case and John Foderaro's massively unintelligent rationale for why you cannot write code in "modern" languages with a case-insensitive reader. The reader's ability to be case-insensitive was actually broken by design in the case-sensitive mode, but fortunately, there are still good people at Franz, and this did get fixed. Now, it is not exactly rocket science to figure out how to make a Common Lisp system use lower-case symbol names in a way that does not mean switching the whole goddamn system from lower-case to upper-case and back, but they consider that _sufficient_ and do not want to listen to suggestions to avoid mode switches and multiple Lisp images. _All_ of my frustrations with Franz Inc can be traced to the hostility towards the standard and the disingenious excuses they engage in whenever you want something that chiefly comes from the standard. However, I have received so much positive feedback and real help and understanding from nigh _everybody_ other than John Foderaro and the other fired lunatic that I think the problem can fixed by be excising the root of the problem. I shall therefore assume the role of the professional client in the above concrete analogy who does not want to deal with the deranged lunatic on staff with his peculiar verb and his demented list of priorities and ask Franz Inc to get rid of John Foderaro and make sure that their products are firmly based in conformance to the standard and that they grow an understanding on all levels and fully appreciate that conformance is _not_ a threat to any of their other high-quality products or add-ons or extensions, but that their continued conformance issues are still a serious detractor from their other valuable products. Being the only serious game in town has a responsibility that I cannot tolerate is flaunted and ridiculed the way John Foderaro does. His utter lack of professionalism and serious business sense in dealing with conformance issues has gone from merely annoying to central in my dealing with Franz Inc, mostly because John Foderaro is such an arrogant bastard and so _fantastically_ dishonest and disingenious in his passive-agressive argumentation. Finally, a _professional_ vendor who worked _with_ the standards process would submit a continuous stream of documents to improve the language in the committee, would probably get their will if they were even moderately good ideas, and would be able to gain respect for their work, and they would probably find a way to solve their problems if they had a person on staff who was less irrational than John Foderaro. For all their ills, compromise in standards committees tend to produce results when the people who request strange things manage to avoid offending people who do not want the same thing as them. As the evidence suggests, there is a long-standing "war" between John Foderaro and the committee. I am not certain, but I believe there are no others who harbor such bitterness towards committee decisions like the case issue. I maintain that the only _real_ problem Common Lisp has is that so many of its purported proponents are so negative to the language. ///