Subject: Re: Why I can't use Lisp.
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: 05 Aug 2002 14:44:31 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3237547471622801@naggum.net>

* Andreas Bogk
| I suspect most people asking for a Lisp compiler are really asking for a
| compiler that gives them all the features they've heard Lisp would have.  In
| other words, more "Lisp the family" than Common Lisp.

  Your suspicions are wrong.  Someone who comes asking for a Lisp compiler does
  /not/ want Scheme or Dylan.  They know how to ask for Scheme and Dylan if
  they want it.  Really.  Trust me.  Nobody /ever/ comes to comp.lang.lisp to
  field their inquiries into Dylan and accidentally happen to call it "Lisp".
  That is one real test of whether something is or is not a Lisp.  However,
  your disgracefully disrespectful attitude that you are right about this and
  everybody else, especially seasoned users of the language in the community
  you disrespect, is really annoying.  You think you know better than every
  single living Lisp programmer.  What gall!  What immeasurable arrogance!
  What utter cluelessness!

| No, Common Lisp is an instance of Lisp, which is a subclass of "dynamically
| typed language".

  Look, we have multiple inheritance here, and no one superclass is /defining/.

| If you look at the history of Dylan, you will see that the roots of it are in
| the Lisp community.

  Which you *abandoned* because you no longer wanted to support Lisp!

  What we in the Lisp community, if I may be so bold as to speak for the
  numerous people who take exception to your classification, and who and whose
  learned opinions you dismiss out of hand and purposefully ignore, do not
  consider Dylan a Lisp.  Deal with it.  Stop annoying people so much.  Listen
  to what people tell you.  Figure it out.  Sheesh, dude, this is /not/ hard.

| The very same people who brougt you the Common Lisp standard, CLIM, CMU CL,
| and a lot of other things worked on Dylan, and it was supposed to be the next
| big thing after Common Lisp, and an improvement over it.

  But you chucked the syntax, you frigging dimwit!  You /left/ the Lisp community
  with that choice.  You are not competing with Common Lisp, you are not at all
  "improving" on Common Lisp by taking away something that many people really,
  really value in Common Lisp.  That you think so and are apparently unable to
  back down from your religious belief is so amazingly annoying that I wish I
  could slap your stupid face and hope you snap out of it.  Sadly, you have
  demonstrated such amazing cluelessness and the arrogance to go with it that
  the impression here, if I may again interpret the /massive/ rejection of your
  claims to be a consensus, is that Dylan is the language of choice for people
  who are /utterly/ unable to deal with counter-information.  You and that
  other bozo from the Dylan camp keep arguing /here/ in order to /convince/ people
  who have no interest in your language whatsoever that it is somehow a Lisp,
  when /one look/ at Dylan will reveal that it /lifted/ a number of concepts from
  real Lisps, /spit/ on their syntax tradition and those who much prefer it over
  yeat another Algol-Pascal-whatever derivate, and then you people have the
  /chutzpah/ to tell people you disrespect and ridicule that your stolen lemon of
  a language is an "improvement" over Common Lisp!  Sure, you think so, and you
  can think so as much as you like in comp.lang.dylan.advocacy, but if you have
  to go running like a missionary to convert the heathens to your belief, you
  tell everybody that Dylan is the kind of language that is used by people who
  have no working brain, it is for /believers/ and /non-thinkers/ who accept your
  bogus claims at face value.  "Yeah, it really is a Lisp because Andreas Borg
  says so", but resistance is not futile.  We /shall not/ be assimilated.

  Appealing to authority by imputing similarity between different products just
  because the same people worked on them is such a ridiculous denigration of
  their intelligence and their work ethics that I am almost speechless.  How
  /dare/ you assume that people choose Common Lisp because persons X, Y, and Z
  worked on it?  How /dare/ you imply that persons X, Y, and Z are unable to
  accomplish more than one useful thing in their entire life, so if they do two
  things, they must somehow be the same?  How /dare/ you implicitly indicate
  that persons X, Y, and Z are unable to change direction in their life at will?

  Jesus, idiots like you make me /angry/!  And now that I had taken nearly a
  month off the newsgroup because I found that more than anything else, I wrote
  articles to clarify my own thinking instead of wanting to help the morons who
  are never satisfied, anyway.  I wrote and filed, but did not post, many a
  response, and it was so liberating to know that I would be relieved of the
  idiotic, hostile responses.  Over the past week or so, I have posted what
  I believe to be more insightful than blabbering, but cretin like yourself
  really do make me realize that newsgroups are mostly for trolls and idiots.
  Look at how many responses you have received!  And only because you are so
  blindingly stubborn and /wrong/.  Be right about something, and nobody says a
  word, write something insightful that required much thought on your end, and
  you are guaranteed silence (but occasionally some uplifting mail).  But say
  something utterly boneheaded that pisses people off simply because it is so
  stupid that people who make such rabid mistakes must be corrected, and you
  get to control the whole goddamn agenda in the newsgroup for a while.

  But people like you, Andreas Bogk, are truly incorrigible.  You are a waste
  of time for anyone to respond to.  You are unable to deal with contradictory
  information or opinions.  Your purpose here is to annoy and /pester/ people
  with your retarded beliefs that you are certainly /not/ prepared to discard in
  the face of overwhelming rejection.

| That's why I'm talking in terms of specific features.  This does produce
| something like a distance metric, and I can say things like "Dylan is much
| more like Common Lisp than like Java".

  I like to see distance metrics graphically.

    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
    idiot         ^                                       common lisp programmer
                 you

  The fact is, your Dylan programs look like one of those rejected languages
  that did /not/ become that celebrated commercial success called "Ada".

  Grow a damn clue!  Dylan proselytizing and marketing is /not/ welcome here,
  yet people flock to tell you this because you are so helplessly unintelligent
  that you stick to your beliefs no matter what people tell you.  Why?  Why do
  we all (me included) get so upset about such /fucking morons/ that we just
  /have/ to post some rebuttal?  These people are positively /brimming/ with
  bovine excretions, yet neither putridity nor the methane deters people from
  trying to make it into something else.  Get this: */they will never get it/*.

  USENET has been fertilized so heavily that it is no longer fecund.  And all
  that that methane does on USENET is cause spontaneous combustion.

  See on you all August 15, provided you can stop responding to the nutjobs.

-- 
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.