Subject: Re: How to get a wider audience for CL From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 30 Aug 2002 00:30:48 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3239656248692545@naggum.no> * Pascal Costanza | This warning makes a newbie insecure. What this means is that there has been a dearth of teaching the necessary reading skills. "Caveat lector" should be at least as important in people's lives as the caveat emptor that has entered our common vocabulary and the business ethics. | Is it important if I'm typical? I can only repeat myself: There's always | more than one path to enlightenment. The more paths you provide the more | people you attract. But have you followed this dictum yourself? You seem to be a firm believer in your past successes in learning programming languages, even though you appear to get the message that there is more to it than you have seen so far. You realize, I hope, that your article will be another non-reference-material resource on Common Lisp that you hope people will want to read when they desire to learn Common Lisp. If you truly believed in the specification-only learning mode, it seems to follow that you would not have written this text. I take this to mean there is hope for your appreciation of other paths to enlightenment that may go through both historic and tutorial documents. One of the major attractions that Common Lisp offer me personally is that there is just so much in and around it that I would benefit from. I came to the point of SGML expertise where (I thought) I would not be able to develop any further, where there would be nothing more for me to learn, and I found myself always helping people without the reward of learning anything new. This exhausted me and contributed strongly to abandoning 6 years of concentrated effort on something I have additionally come to think of as fundamentally braindamaged. I decided to work in an area where the probability of dealing with people who were smarter than me was nonzero and the Lisp and Scheme worlds offer this in abundance. To work in areas where the sum total of knowledge is acquirable in your youth may seem exciting to the youth, but to realize that you have wasted your most absorbent days on something that would bore you when you exhausted the supply of ideas is nothing but painful to the old. -- 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.