Subject: Re: WiRED: Lisp and Smalltalk on "Endangered Species" list From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 03:52:05 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3233361124321651@naggum.net> * Kenny Tilton | Still no link, but check the NY Times archive, Science Times, going back | 10-15 years or so. Study showed that the survivors of an atrocity | happiest decades later were those who moved on and never looked back. | Those who dwelt on the experience turned out the worst. Kenny, with all due respect, we have our own archive of "atrocities" in this newsgroup. Those who get over things, turn out the best, and those who dwell on the experience and downright refuse to let go, turn out the worst, often going to pieces in public most disgracefully. Don't need no stinkin' study to grasp this, hence my frequent requet for people to just get over it. My stance is: So Scheme happened. Please refrain from reminding me. (I get pissed off when people remind me too much, though. I recall a brilliant retort to a whining loser who clamored for someone's opinion on him. "But what do you think of me?" "I don't think of you.") (Incidentally, denial is a form of not coping with something. It is very different from actually coping well with something. Leting bygones be bygones is not denial, it is the healthiest and most mature reaction you can have to anything that happens to you: You can _not_ chnage the past, but you can learn from it and turn whatever happened into an asset. If you can only build on "luck", and not build on setbacks or adversity, you are not in control of your life or your destiny -- whatever constitutes "luck" is. A certain U.S. president would do well to figure out, using his meager intellectual prowess, what it means to deal _rationally_ with a disaster, before he takes the whole Western world wih him into his permanent victim mode and goes just as bananas about irrational revenge as a few tribes in the Middle East, who also cannot get over _anything_. I mean, now we know what happened to an an emotional doofus like Anakin, right? The path to the Dark Side is paved with bad retentions.) In a flash of on-topicness, I realized that Common Lisp community is fraught with people who cannot let go of certain design decisions. The most annoying failure to get over an arbitrary decision is the case of symbols. The addition of the loop macro is another regretted decision. Some have serious coping problems with the numeric contagion rules. It seems to me that if someone needs an excuse not to use Common Lisp, the best place to go look for ammunition is the Common Lisp community itself: I know of no other community where so many people still remain in the community after being so unhappy with some design choice that they cannot get over it and therefore seize any opportunity to denounce the whole language for its "failure" to do their bidding -- while still using it, or at least not quitting the community fair and square. Re Scheme, it is an unfortunate fact that a few misguided people discarded the wisdom of much smarter people and regressed to a single namespace, but if you want that kind of braindamage, you know where to get it -- there is no need to carp on the decision made by Common Lisp to support _intelligent_ and _human_ programmers as if you could possibly change anything by being a resilient whiner. -- 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. 70 percent of American adults do not understand the scientific process.