Subject: Re: Promoting CL Was: What I want from my Common Lisp vendor and the Common Lisp community
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2001 22:34:28 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3208545267783067@naggum.net>

* John Foderaro <jkf@unspamx.franz.com>
> Are you purposely trying to confuse people here?  

  So quoting me is too much for your need for references?  *snicker*

> I'm not the one who made the big deal of that document on if*, you are.

  Oh, right.  Sorry.  John Foderaro should be allowed to criticize
  anything, but criticize John Foderaro, and you are his enemy.  Remember
  that line about "enemy list"?  Could you cough up a reference to that
  list, please?  I regret that I have temporarily taken my machine off the
  web for security reasons, but I can assure you that no such list exists,
  either published or unpublished, but still John Foderaro accuses me of
  having one and being on it.  So, I should say that you are the one that
  made such a big deal of being my enemy.  Does this help anyone understand
  how you have reacted from day one?  It explained a lot to me, at least.
 
> You took it as an attack on the Common Lisp standard.

  It is not?  Geez.

> In fact it is just the opposite.

  Oh, I see.   I have not been attacking you, either, John Foderaro, in
  fact, just the opposite.  You see that now, too, I hope.

> It shows that Common Lisp gives you the flexibility to define forms that
> make your code easier for you to read.

  Why did you have to knock the standard conditionals just to say that?  I
  have asked you repeatedly, yet you never answer, so I guess you cannot
  answer (in the spirit of your own style of argument, I am allowed to
  assume something from a lack of answer, right?), whether you could have
  expressed your new, f*king brilliant IF* shit in positive terms that did
  not reflect your stupid personal hangup with aestetics in the standard.

> Java doesn't allow that.  C and C++ give you a very weak macro extension
> language.

  Who cares?  Are you using Java a lot?  Last I heard, you rant even more
  irrationally about Java than about the "braindamage" in Common Lisp.

  I happen to like Java, too.  That is probably because I have figured out
  that it sometimes makes sense to appreciate things on their own terms, as
  opposed to some completely different terms that makes everything look bad.

  I have certainly not stopped liking C.  On its own terms, it is a good
  language.  There are a lot of things in C that I would like to see in a
  Common Lisp system.  Access to machine words and the machine operations
  on them is the only way to achieve high efficiency in some algorithms.
  Writing sufficiently complex code that it needs macros in C is a mistake
  -- if you need that, write in Common Lisp and generate the code you want;
  C is not that hard to generate human-readable code from.

///