Subject: Re: PART TWO: winning industrial-use of lisp: Re: Norvig's latest paper on Lisp From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2002 14:58:24 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3233660303542269@naggum.net> * James A. Crippen | Erik Naggum, are you a native speaker of English? Were you raised in a | family that spoke English, all of whom were native speakers? Since it appears that your elevated emotional state tries to deny that you had a question, I shall all the same try to answer that question and ignore your psychotic state of mind for now. I am biliingual. I have been raised in a Norwegian family near Oslo, but with several American NATO officer families as neighbors and personal friends, their kids my playmates, and have spent at least half of the years from 4 to 15 in American households, albeit those of NATO officer families living in Oslo for up to 8 years at a time. I even went to American churches in Oslo with these families and I have spent more than 4 years total in the U.S., myself. When I visit, I am routinely taken for a native speaker and expected to know things that all natives know and sometimes have to flash a foreign credit card in shops to inform people of my non-native status. I am, of course, not up to speed on current language developments, and I prefer a written form that is much more formal and neutral than most Americans use, mainly because I am uncertain about the effect of most slang and idioms in written use, but I have also worked with linguists and lexicographers, have personal friends working for Houghton-Mifflin on their dictionaries, and spend more the 3/4 of my telephone time with Americans. Norwegian culture is also permeated, if not saturated, with Americanisms. 90% of all movies shown in Oslo are American. >95% of my 1200+ volume personal library are written by Americans and published in the United States. I do not recognize when I switch between American English and Norwegian in mixed company. Next time you feel like George W. Bush after the WTC, ask a simple question! | How'd you like your kids to immigrate to America and get beaten for speaking | Norwegian in school, Erik? Does that sound fun? It's the same attitude. | And the same as yours. Your hurt feelings do not constitute a valid source of information about a reality you do not know, nor allow your assumptions emanating from them to form reasonable grounds for extrapolating into yet more retarded emotional responses. The moment you lapse into the confused state of mind where your feelings create the reality in which you respond to others, you are, in fact, clinically psychotic. It is what makes the phrase "to go mad with rage" technically accurate. Dealing with psychotics is not my strong suit, nor is dealing with children who want to appear to be grown up, but could you cut the fucking crap and sit still and perhaps regain your normal composure _before_ you reply to this message? I realize that communication with you is going to fail with an overwhelming probabiliy, but GROW THE FUCK UP before you try to respond and maybe you can beat the odds. That is, if you had anything to say beyond voicing your immature emotions from being prematurely offended by what was not even so. -- Guide to non-spammers: If you want to send me a business proposal, please be specific and do not put "business proposal" in the Subject header. If it is urgent, do not use the word "urgent". If you need an immediate answer, give me a reason, do not shout "for your immediate attention". Thank you.