Subject: Re: More: Very large reals... From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 10:49:38 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3223622982548393@naggum.net> * Erann Gat | I really wish that the *real* leaders of the Lisp community, like Kent | and Duane and Paul Graham and Peter Norvig and Dick Gabriel, and even | Erik, would lead this community in what I perceived to be a productive | direction that I could both contribute to and benefit from. The obnoxious follower is in other words looking for the right leaders to follow ... | Alas, what I perceive is that this is not happening. ... and faults his leaders for not being "followable". | Erik seems intent on transforming Lisp from a programming language into a | religion. What was that gripe about gross distortions of your views, again? Are you _really_ so goddamn unintelligent as you prefer to portray yourself? You are longer on insult than I am, Erann Gat, and _way_ shorter on contents. Your thinking here is just as vacuous as that insult is. | I believe in the maxim that one should lead, follow, or get out of the | way. I tried following, that worked for a long time, but it doesn't | today, at least not for me, and apparently not for a lot of people. So | I'm going to try leading for a while. If that doesn't work, I'll get out | of the way. I honestly believe you are in the way and should get the hell out of it. Popularity contests are not fought in newsgroups. The only people who voice their opinions are those who have a contrary view to yours, and when that happens, you go bananas and think "religion" and what-not and claim that it is somebody else's fault that you cannot get what you want. The argument made by Patrick that you externalize your own problems seems right on target. | Yes, I agree. That's why one of the things I think needs to be done is | to hide Common Lisp (or something like it) under the guise of a new name | and surface syntax with a simple mapping to S-expressions underneath. And the DYLAN experience was not enough to discourage this nonsense? It is _not_ the s-expression syntax that ticks people off, it is the total lack of familiarity with the _words_, the very unusual way that the words have meaning while the syntax has (almost) none, and the fact that you have to know _each_ word to grasp the meaning of a function that someone else wrote. This is _not_ a problem: What is a problem is that people want to be able to do something "useful" without knowing squat about their tools or languages. I mean, when people have picked up K&R and typed in the "hello, world" codelet and it runs, that is rewarding to a rank beginner. It is _not_ rewarding to a seasoned programmer. It is a huge mistake to offer Common Lisp to beginners. (Scheme even more so.) | Here's a theory I've developed over the years: the digital world has | become so complicated that it's impossible for any one person to keep up. What does this mean? "My circle of friends has become so large that I can no longer keep up" means that you are no longer able to obtain information about what happens to people you care about, miss out on deaths in their families, new or passing pets, new or passing lovers, people moving, etc. If this is the meaning, it has _never_ been possible for any one person to keep up with the "digital world", wherever the hell the boundaries for _that_ is, so the criticism is _completely_ vacuous. | People therefore rely on the opinions of others at least as guides to | where they should focus their attention and often as guides to actual | decisions. And this was a change from _what_? There is absolutely no merit to the "therefore". People have always done this, too. Local communities of people who do things certain ways is the way human society has evolved. There is _nothing_ peculiar about the digital world in this regard. | In such a climate there is a positive-feedback effect where ideas get | accepted as truth completely irrespective of actual facts. This is true in all possible climates. Nothing special, nothing new. | One influential "consultant" says something, enough people embody that | opinion into their worldview, and suddenly "everybody just knows" that X | is true. Sure, until the next influential "consultant" comes along. | This has happened to languages like Lisp and Dylan and Eiffel: everybody | just knows that no one uses them, they aren't good for anything (except | that Lisp is good for AI), and so the vast majority of people don't even | bother to learn about them. This line of reasoning is not empirically supported. If the majority of people do not bother to learn Common Lisp, Dylan, or Eiffel, it is _not_ because they know that _nobody_ uses them. It is because the people they hang out with, the people they compete with for jobs, etc, do not use it. If a job offer comes up that requires a skill, a lot of people are smart enough to figure out that they could get it if they had that skill, and go learn it. If some entrepreneurial guy discovers something unusual that he thinks will offer him an edge over his competition, he _will_ use it to that effect. | Interestingly, the Lisp community is a little island of this same | phenomenon happening, but anchored to a different "local maximum". But how the hell is this _different_ from anything? _Every_ community is anchored to its own local maximum. Every community is different. There is no global maximum. What is considered the most popular thing on earth depends on who you ask. The only problem we seem to have is that Common Lisp is not even the most popular language in its very own community, thanks to people like you. | In the Lisp community, Lisp is the ultimate language, all language | innovations that can possibly happen have already happened, and Lisp | incorporates them all, so there is no point in learning any language | other than Lisp. What a load of crap. If this is one your premises, no wonder you have to be a fucking obnoxious pest in this forum and fight what you think is wrong, like you fight all other meaningless things you think is wrong. | I am caricaturing, of course, and most people don't take these extreme | position in their pure form. I challenge you to find that it is present in even one person regarding even one programming language innovation. The insulting attribution of stupidity on such a massive scale to a whole community is how you get dethroned as a leader, not how you gain followers. | But (putting on my scientist hat for a moment) this theory actually makes | a testable prediction: that most people who like Lisp don't know much | about other langauges, and most people who like other langauges don't | know much about Lisp. With a scientist hat, you would at least have called it a hypothesis. But. good, at last a way to make you realize that you are wrong. Not only empirically, but also logically: Common Lisp is not only hard to find, it is, by your very own testimony, unpopular and good for nothing, so one cannot escape wondering how people first discover it. It is _so_ very unlikely that people pick up a Common Lisp book in the computer section of their favorite bookstore or library and say "hey, I want to learn about computers and this language!". (Well, I actually discovered computers and Basic that way from my favorite library as a kid because it had classified computers right next to mathematics, but the likelihood that it be Common Lisp is and will remain very close to zero.) The average discoverer of Common Lisp _must_ therefore have been exposed to at least several other languages, have found that computer programming is rewarding and also have been _dissatisfied_ with what he was already familiar with, or he would simply have stuck with that "tradition". In fact, I discovered Lisp by accident and was unable to use it for anything for years, but the ideas it had presented somehow "fit" how I thought. Being so obnoxious as to list a lot of languages is counter-productive, but the languages that I have taken an interest in _after_ I learned Common Lisp appear to be even more important to defeat your stupid line of argument than those I knew before, and those include: Java, Dylan, Ada 95, JavaScript, Python, SQL, and Perl. In all cases, I have looked for stuff that I could learn from and incorporate into my own thinking. In a lot of cases, I have determined, after a significant period of study, that the value of switching to those languages as my "mainstay" would be a very bad idea. Java is too big for me and too much of a moving target and also seems to depend very much on "living" in a Java community, but that means a lot of _really_ ignorant people who know _only_ Java, and very little about computer programming. If I cannot become filthy rich programming Common Lisp, I no longer have the stomach (literally) to try to become filthy rich _programming_. This is why I am preparing to change carreer to law over the next few years, because, as I joke: there are two _really_ suspicious professionals: an old programmer, and a young lawyer. | (Here's a data point: when Paul Graham started designing Arc he didn't | know Python.) That is not a data point for your hypothesis. /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.