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: Tue, 04 Sep 2001 00:18:17 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3208551490117677@naggum.net> * John Foderaro <jkf@unspamx.franz.com> > My opinions are based on 23 years of programming experience in Lisp. > That doesn't mean that you have to agree with them but at least it should > cause you to pause and think for a bit. I don't think that you gave what > I wrote much thought at all. How much thought do you expect anyone to give a paper that calls itself "lisp coding standards" and which contains two grave insults and a silly comment on comments that is completely useless? And this is the result of 23 years of programming in Lisp? Sheesh! > I've contributed a lot of Lisp code to the community even before the term > opensource existed. What have you contributed? Is this intimidation tactic a way of saying that you are _entitled_ to destroy and denigrate Common Lisp, but those who criticize you for it are not entitled to criticize because of their lack of contributions? Where do you _get_ all this arrogance? What are you trying to defend? > Post something in comp.lang.lisp saying how you're denegrating the Common > Lisp standard by inventing your own control macro? Why are you constantly _not_ getting that it is your very unintelligent insults that cause the majority of the hostility and not your very silly macros? > Why don't you now get on my case for including uses of these macros and > not giving you the source code for the macros? Because it is your gratuitous insults that get people on your case, not your macros. How _can_ you fail to understand this? You act like a person who _knows_ he is guilty as sin and tries very, very hard to pretend he has done nothing wrong by trying to deflect all criticism. So many people have pointed out to you that this is about your attitude that it _must_ be a matter of will that you do not get it. Otherwise, 23 years of experience with that level of inability to understand things is not really worth a lot. > That's a much better solution than telling someone who is doing you a > favor by releasing his code for free to change his code to suit your > personal coding standards. I remember three distinct occasions when I mailed real bug-fixes to your code and received _very_ hostile comments back that you could not use it because it used loop and if and when and unless. I believe at least one of those incidents prompted your writing your digusting Lisp Coding Standards document. Suffice to say that from then on, I viewed your ability to think straight to be permanently impaired. The bugs were still unfixed for at least one release, by the way, and there are still bugs in that code: The symbol printer and reader in Allegro CL does not conform to the standard and violate print-read consistency expectations. After having tried to explain to you how you could have avoided those bugs, you simply failed to implement them because I use a much richer set of conditionals in Common Lisp than you do. I do not string a whole bunch of if* together in an unreadable mass of spaghetti code, I choose the most readable form with care. Therefore, I manage to find and fix such bugs only after converting the if* mess to something readable, while your code has been buggy for over a decade, but you do not wany my fixes. In other words, I have solid evidence that your personal coding standards are much more important to you than working, conforming Common Lisp. > How dare you insinuate that I'm not enthusiastic about Common Lisp? Try reading your own language. Try remembering how you react when people say that upper-case names symbols are required the standard. Try actually _answering_ some of the many questions you have been asked, to which positive answers would really have helped, while double negatives really do not help at all. Instead of attacking people with the above negative, try writing something _positive_ for a change. > The programmers working in companies producing commercial Common Lisp > systems are the most enthusiastic people about Common Lisp you will ever > find. I would have expected some humility in such a statement, such as at least including a "probably" or "in my experience". Making it sound like a universal truth means it can be shot down as false or dishonest with a single counter-example. Such a universal statement is also an insult to the many people who clearly exceed you in terms of enthusiasm and a strong reason not to work with you. This is probably what you want. The reason I have not applied for a job at Franz Inc. and probably never will is that your statement is manifestly untrue. A few people at Franz Inc. have really gone out of their way to destroy the credibility of the standard, imply very strongly that you are in a market position where you can dictate the standard and lock people in. Most of them fortunately quit and others have assured me that they really had no effect on policy, but they got _hired_. I would have loved to work full time with most of your staff, but you, in particular, and a few others, have really managed to rub me the wrong way, and you, in particular, have done everything you can to make my insistence on conformance be unwelcome and result in no action when I point out conformance problems. Your insane ranting here is not doing anything to help this, and your idiotic "religious zealot" stamp because I do not approve of your if* stunt and particularly do not approve of your constant need to denigrate the standard and the people behind it. I have very high respect for some of the people you have spent _hours_ insulting to my face. I have _none_ for you, anymore. You have done more to destroy that respect in this thread than anything else you have done, however, including your pathetic passive-aggressvieness, your dishonesty, and your personal need to misrepresent me and _pretend_ that you do not have a clue what I am talking about. I would have thought the most enthusiastic people about Common Lisp I would ever find would be a lot smarter about expressing it positively, and _definitely_ not so pathetically self-defensive about his own destructiveness as you are. > My opinions are based on 23 years of programming experience in Lisp. I _really_ hope I have had more to contribute by the time that I have as much experience than some silly rewrite of cond and personal distaste for a powerful iteration macro. Most of the other people who have had in excess of two decades of Lisp experience have been fantastically helpful to me and have imparted so much wisdom about the language that I feel that my 6-8 years of Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp have been much more, although I met my first Lisp in 1978 or 1980. That is part of the reason I feel disappointed, and more than that, almost betrayed, when someone with so much more experience chooses to sully the language and present his experience as insulting comments about standard features. (Again, never mind the infinitely silly if* macro -- it is of minimal material consequence compared to the insulting attitude -- it makes you look really ignorant and _far_ from really experienced.) ///