Subject: Re: I'm outta here... From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 02:26:05 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3214866361054904@naggum.net> * Rajappa Iyer | Why let anyone drive you out of the newsgroup? Because he lost the fight he chose to pick, of course. The worst losers always have to announce their withdrawal from the forum in which they have chosen to embarrass themselves beyond shame, rather than try to do something less embarrassing. That is _why_ they are losers. If they had had any notion of constructive use of the forum they leave, they would simply have done something constructive, instead of only telling _others_ what to do when they cannot do it themselves. Nobody drove him out of the newsgroup. Such "passiveness" is typical of people who cannot take charge of their own situation and fix whatever they do not like -- be it the "tone" in a newsgroup or a feature in a language -- it has to be somebody else's fault, and the more they "refuse to fix it", the more they can believe in conspiracies and bad people who make their lives miserable. This is the way of the loser. He has, in fact, _full_ control over his own actions and he could simply have quit posting his insane drivel, lies, and attacks. He himself suggested he do that, but when he failed to keep his word (again, it was somebody else's fault), he chooses to make a stink and slam the door on his way out, believing that this would not be considered the ultimate act of cowardice. Now, Treat John Foderaro like an adult, not the child he appears to be. He does _not_ deserve anyone's pity for not being able to control himself and just do what he says and demands of others. He has been using stupid intimidation techniques to "win" by destroying his opponents, but nobody wins that way. You win a debate by being smarter than your opponent, not by being more stupid. If somebody says something hurtful, it may create a sense of satisfaction to take revenge, but nothing has happened to that which hurt. Idiots seek personal revenge. Mature people seek justice. Smart people seek to understand and to outsmart their critics. If you love Google like he does, check out how he treats people who makes _any_ argument against his beliefs. "That is *your* opinion" is just not a grown man's reaction to honest concern, and callling people who disagree with him a "cult" and "religious" is simply not something you do if you have a working brain and actually want to participate in a technical forum. Why is this man the Chief Scientist at a major Common Lisp vendor? John Foderaro abused this forum to further his personal agendas, one of which is to undermine the ANSI CL standard, which was _supposed_ to be our common point of agreement, but which he has rejected. John Foderaro has rejected this forum just as he has rejected Common Lisp, and _that_ he did long before the standard was finalized. His inability to convince a committee of really smart people to use lower-case symbol names (which would have been a really good idea), for instance, has been eating him up since before Common Lisp the Language was published in 1984 and he was not a member of the committee that produced the ANSI standard. Why? Because it has _never_ been a technical issue to him that he could get reasonable people to agree with him on. If it had been, I am certain the committee would have found ways to accomodate him beyond readtable-case and :invert, but you do not get people to work towards your goals if you call them "braindamaged" in working relationships. It has become clear to me while trying to work with John Foderaro that certain things are not subject to solution: He _prefers_ to be griping about them forever rather than solve them in a compatible way. This is _exactly_ what we have seen from him in this newsgroup. For instance, readtables were added to the language in 1989, but not fully supported in Allegro CL until 2000. This is the kind of thing in the standard that would have accomodated what he said he wanted and would have let people use a case-sensitive Common Lisp reader if they wanted to, but instead of this, they got set-case-mode, an ancient tool which works by _converting_ all the symbol names in the entire Lsp image, and which did not let people mix "modern mode" with readtable-case functionality until another engineer at Franz Inc did the work at my persistent request. I believe that John Foderaro is as much an impediment to conformance in Franz Inc products as he is a detractor from community acceptance of the standard in this group. Now, for six months, if you believe that, we can work together, knowing that at least one fewer stupid jerk will waste our time quibbling over non-issues and going postal when somebody does not accept his hostile comments towards the foundation for the community. No other programming language community has been subject to such rampant idiocy after they had achieved a standard. People have either left the process or accepted the defeat and moved on with their lives -- griping about a failure to get a committee to agree with you is simply not worth decades of anger. The end result is that those who have stayed have been _enthusiastic_ about the standard. Somehow, the Common Lisp community has not achieved that level of community agreement about _its_ standard, and the person _most_ responsible for this is John Foderaro, who has also been such a clear and present danger of filibustering and making serious problems in case we reopen the standard that it probably will never happen. If people have tired of John Foderaro in this newsgroup, imagine what he will do when a committee does not agree with him. If he could not get over upper-case symbol names in 15 years, nobody should expect that he does after a new committee vote on the matter. When I made a point out of what I wanted from my Common Lisp vendor, it was precisely to ask John Foderaro (and Franz Inc by extension) to grow up and realize that he was hurting the community with his negative attitude towards what the community had already agreed upon. If he does not accept that, he should simply find another community -- not that I think there is room for it -- or create one, but _not_ under the name Common Lisp. The Open Source stuff he posts (which I do not trust enough to use and think looks like some ancient pre-Common Lisp that has little to do with good, modern Common Lisp style) is an attempt to build a new community to his own liking, but what I really do not understand is what attraction _Common_Lisp_ has to him when it is so braindamaged and stupidly designed as he claims. Most of us can always find something we hate about something big and useful, but smart people figure out how to live with it in a constructive way. It appears that his griping about these misfeatures is his raison d'être, or at least for staying in the Common Lisp community. Several trolls in comp.lang.lisp have shared this personality disorder and cannot live without complaining about something. Six months without each of them would really be nice. One less troll is a good thing. /// -- Norway is now run by a priest from the fundamentalist Christian People's Party, the fifth largest party representing one eighth of the electorate. -- Carrying a Swiss Army pocket knife in Oslo, Norway, is a criminal offense.