could you _please_ consult a drug rehabilitation center?  your weird
  hallucinations are making communication with you very difficult.  until
  you're clean, there's no point even in asking you what you were thinking
  you would get out of such evidence of serious braindamage.

  attack me for what I have done, if you are so inclined, but if you have
  to invent stuff that I haven't done so you can have something to attack
  me for, you don't do a very good job of portraying XEmacs users as other
  than lunatics, if that was your intended mission.  sheesh.

  and quality suffers much more from competition from splinter groups than
  mere quantity.  e.g., MULE would not have been as braindamaged had it not
  been for XEmacs.

So I'm not the one "inventing" anything here.

  of course you did.  you _did_ realize that poking people in the eye
  generally has predictable results.  I'm sure that in your perverted
  ethics it is also the victim's fault when you poke them in the eye.

| Less than 24 hours ago you wrote in <3141791238952...@naggum.no>:
|
|   and quality suffers much more from competition from splinter groups than
|   mere quantity.  e.g., MULE would not have been as braindamaged had it not
|   been for XEmacs.
|
| So I'm not the one "inventing" anything here.

  yes, you are, and like the raving paranoid, of course you don't see that
  you're matching your hallucinations up with the scantiest piece of fact.

  the above is not blaming the MULEshit in Emacs on XEmacs per se, but on
  the _competition_ from XEmacs that led to the perceived need to have a
  feature that the competition did, and the quality thus suffered.  the
  problem isn't XEmacs, it is the perceived need to compete with it.  this
  need is not causally linked t XEmacs at all -- XEmacs just exposes it.
  _any_ similar competition would have caused Richard Stallman to jump too
  soon and add immature features for no other reason than to try to keep up
  with the competition -- MULE happened this way, and numerous other really
  bad decisions have been made in the name of competition.  but making this
  into _blaming_ them on XEmacs is so deranged only you could have thought
  it up.  now, do you want me to spell it out for you and spoonfeed you
  with the obvious context that your hallucinations made you "overlook", or
  are you able to understand what I'm saying without more hallucinations?

  I'm asking _you_, Rainer, because the incessant whining strongly implies
  that if you can't have it all (for free, to boot), you can't use _any_ of
  it, which I have learned to recognize as the identifying mark of losers.
  your getting so damn defensive about all this keeps telling me something
  about CLIM that I really didn't want to know.

  in less than a week, most of which was spent nosediving into manuals and
  specifications, I implemented a very small Emacs read-eval-redisplay loop
  and multiple buffers and a bunch of non-trivial stuff, which used CLIM to
  update the display automagically and all.  I found that CLIM made a whole
  lot of stuff real easy, that it caused an enormous amount of X traffic,
  that its redisplay code was horribly slow, and I needed to get below CLIM
  to get control of the stuff that an Emacs would need.  it couldn't cover
  my needs and disappointed me greatly, but I readily admit that Emacs is a
  bad test case and that I didn't have a chance to play much with it at the
  time.  now that Franz Inc supports CLIM for Linux, maybe I can get back
  to play with it, but it seems to depend very heavily on a particular
  MOTIF implementation (even though I have full access to the entire MOTIF
  source base, I never got building it for Linux to complete successfully).

  I've spent all week trying to catch up with news after a couple week's
  vacation, but when I see how hostile Andrew Cooke is to participants in
  this newsgroup (how is accusing people of "ghetto-like mentality" going
  to help things?), I start to wonder whether he actually prefers lingering
  and suppressed aggression, scheming, and backstabbing to open aggression.

  I prefer people who speak their mind instead of waiting for a long time
  to make a really big issue out of individual issues that normal people
  would have a normal reaction to that let others know they were annoyed,
  but those who have to suppress their emotions would have to accumulate
  every time they suppressed them.  you see, Andrew, those who speak their
  mind immediately DON'T accumulate their anger, so when you see open
  aggression, it is not because someone who has suppressed his anger for
  years got mad, it's a genuinely useful way to AVOID ever getting mad in
  the face of a lot of stupidity and annoyances in open fora.

  in a suppressed-emotion world, you're supposed to grin and bear it, which
  means that the thresholds are so high that only if one did in fact view
  non-Lisp users as idiots would the behavior you don't understand become
  applicable, but this is not so.  instead of reacting severely only to
  major crimes, people say "hey! you!" at every contact with people who do
  the wrong thing.  you interpret that as people being loudmouths and rude
  and whatnot, without understanding that anyone could be so culturally
  challenged (in your view) as to care about these small things.

  suppression of emotion and the "grin and bear it" mentality don't scale
  very well, and people tend to get a lot more upset with the scheming,
  backstabbing bastards whose anger has lingered for so long they have been
  completely blinded by it and can no longer see anything but that which
  annoys them -- in brief, they actually do get depressed by it all.  you
  see, Andrew, that's just what happens to people who _don't_ speak their
  mind in time.

  so, what you see is a healthy discourse among people who aren't so
  uptight they fear that someone might see they are hurt or annoyed in
  public.  being so uptight that such fear rules one's life probably works
  in very small communities where everybody thinks and acts this way, but
  it fails miserably in large communities, and especially open communities,
  such as the Internet.

| 5.  If you care about the language and the GUI, why not try and convert
| people rather than make enemies?

  people don't make enemies, the react to actions they don't like.  people
  who make enemies because of their interaction in a newsgroup are mentally
  disturbed and should seek counseling.  those who look at others as if
  that is what they do are probably even more in need of counseling because
  they are obviously unable to cope with anything but suppressed emotions.

  and let's talk about Lisp, not eachother, OK?  people are most intersting
  to people who keep accumulating annoyances do until they have to burst,
  but people you don't intend to relate to are not interesting, even though
  their actions and ideas might be worthy of notice, so unplug and relax,
  Andrew.  you'll feel better and we won't have to listen to your whining
  every time your buffers run full.

  you're missing the point, Rainer.  at issue is not the coupling to the
  actual user interface code, like X windows or whatever.  at issue is how
  much the application code needs to be prepared to produce a by-product.

  it appears to me that your anger at critics of CLIM is misplaced because
  you don't understand what they are criticizing and they think they
  criticize something that isn't wrong with CLIM.  maybe this is because
  you don't see problem other people see and think CLIM has solved a
  serious problem that other people don't see.  I don't know.  but I have
  tried to get you, as an too ardent defender of CLIM, to answer some of my
  questions and issues, which, in particular, are to which degree CLIM
  offers means of abstraction that would be useful even without CLIM in the
  system.  again, it appears to me, from what _you_ say, that it doesn't,
  meaning that CLIM is good provided that you accept a non-trivial amount
  of design methodology that doesn't work too well without CLIM support.

  could you calm down and try to answer such questions?

  I'll make a parallel: we all know that CORBA solves a whole bunch of
  problems in distributed processing, but if that means we have to buy into
  the CORBA philosophy first, it may not be possible to use CORBA if the
  philosophy doesn't fit the application model.  in my view, CORBA is good
  _only_ if you accept that philosophy, and sucks if you don't.  to those
  who don't recognize that there _is_ a "CORBA philosophy", this would be
  an attack on CORBA in areas where it does work and is valuable, because
  they automatically express every problem in terms of the philosphy.

If a group of boys are doing bicycle stunts after school in front of a
group of girls, and another boy that's inexperienced at bicycle stunts
feels a need to also perform bicycle stunts so as to similarly get
attention from the girls, and then he brakes his neck and remains
crippled the rest of his life, the "_competition_" from the boys that
"led to the perceived need to have a feature that the competition did"
was of the boy's own mental fabrication. To sympathize with the boy
and his foolish decision would not be the right thing to do. The boy
should have worked with the other boys and been patient and learned
how to do stunts with his bike the proper way. Instead he rushed out
in all his incompetence and broke his neck of his own free will
because he felt he had to compete with the boys who knew what they
were doing when he was in fact clueless and incompetent.

The original US Constitution, to its disgrace, considers "persons born
in a condition of servitude" (I think that is how it is phrased--I
don't have my copy nearby) equal to 3/5 of free persons for the purpose
of proportional representation in the House of Representatives. But it
also makes no reference to race.

There are many myths, originating with J.-J. Rousseau, about the mis-
treatment of Native Americans by the Europeans. Actually, the Indians
killed at least 10 for 1 in attacks on settlers. Most loss of Indian
population took place through disease, not warfare. That was certainly
unfortunate, to say the least, but it is easy to forget that smallpox,
diphtheria, chicken pox and whooping cough--not to mention cholera,
typhus and typhoid fever--killed lots of Europeans in America. Medicine
just wasn't very good at that time, and the mortality rates for Euros
(from those diseases) stood at close to 50%. The main reason the Euro-
peans dominated the Americas had to do with their agricultural lifestyle.
Agriculture permits much higher population densities than hunting.

--
Julian V. Noble
j...@virginia.edu

  why are you so sure abou this?  it is in the best interest of people who
  desire users to make something _appear_ new, and if you need programmers
  to get excited about your new free software project, what better way to
  get them interested than to re-package some old stuff in maringally new
  ways that can't be used with the rest of the old stuff?  take a good look
  at what the industry accepts as "invention" these days, and shudder.
  free software will not change this, it will only redirect the efforts to
  and the means of appearing new and attractive.

as meaning the software industry isn't being particularly creative.
If so, I retract my comments based upon that interpretation.

And as far as the rest of your tirade- beyond the good points you do
make- go soak your head.  However I haven't seen any convincing
arguments amidst the venom.  You want a better model, fine- so do we
all.  I'll be happy to agree to disagree about the means towards that
end.

(whoops-- off topic-- better recover...)

[Erik:]

Erik said "_any_ similar competition would have caused Richard
Stallman to jump too soon and add immature features for no other
reason than to try to keep up with the competition". Exactly
the behaviour you're ascribing to the boy in your story, and
for essentially the same reasons. Remind me what you're disagreeing
about?

  I'm frankly amazed.  this was a response to the line

||And nobody has tried enough possibilities yet to find the ones that have
||lasting value.

  from Michael Coughlin.  I was trying to explain to him why his point of
  view is formed by what he has seen publicly.

  for the purpose of trying to explain the obvious to you, let's partition
  the industry into two fields: (1) the people who write software and are
  creative in that field, and (2) the people who write marketing drivel for
  the mass markets and are creative in that field.  group (1) do lots of
  cool stuff that nobody see outside of their small groups of developers,
  as it true of all technical creativity, and they would easily find stuff
  of lasting value.  group (2) hype up lots of trivialities and repackage
  old ideas as new because that's how the mass market works, and do their
  very best to make nothing have lasting value, because lasting value means
  reduced sales of new trinkets.

| If so, I retract my comments based upon that interpretation.

  I consider it done.

| However I haven't seen any convincing arguments amidst the venom.

  open your eyes, then.  they appear to have been closed after you had
  decided you had seen enough to make your unfounded judgments of others.

The Cherokee were moved to Oklahoma under the most incredibly inhumane
conditions that killed thousands in defiance of a supreme court order
in their favor.  Etcetra et cetra ad nauseam.

(snip)

War in North America on both sides was much more reminiscent of
the Balkans than anything that occurred in Western Europe at the
time.
   -LenZ-

On 1999-07-23 bernd.pay...@gmx.de said:
   :euphra...@bigwig.net wrote:
   :> And if I may be indelicate, fifty years ago the world had a *big*
   :> disincentive to assigning different values to people put in front
   :> of it.

   :You are makeing the same fault these people and the writers of the
   :declaration of independence did, you equate unequality with unequal
   :values.

Unfortunately you snipped the bit where I drew that exact distinction,
between inequality and unequal worth. What I am saying is that this is
the way the world tends to work, and believe me, I have ample reason for
saying that this is the case. The real world, real human nature, is not
and never will be some kind of Objectivist utopia, until humanity is
able to grow up and see the distinction. *That* is what I am saying.

   :Equal value doesn't result in boring equality, it
   :just requires that you should use the same rules for everybody.

Precisely, but just as you propose that most humans are rather thick, I
will state that most humans are not capable of dealing with difference
to such a degree as awarding it equal value; they will assign weight to
those most like themselves.

I got quite the opposite sense from your post, and from what you have
said on the issue before, interestingly; I thought you came across as
explicitly devaluing those who didn't have the neat "intelligence" skill
that some of us found almost as burdensome as convenient in our
schooldays. (Can you imagine growing up in an environment where being too
bright earns you contempt?)
--
the desk lisard     communa     time's taught the killing game herself

evidence that Perl and Python are doing fine: we can estimate popular
interest in a language by measuring newsgroup traffic.

first # in each line is articles on Netcom's newsspool Jun 1998.
second # is articles on Best's newsspool today.

1438, 4135 in comp.lang.perl.misc

189, 690 in the other 3 perl ngps.

456, 1042 in the 2 python ngps.

198, 960 in scheme and lisp.

I hypothesize that the main reasons for the lack of programmer interest
in Lisp (CL, Scheme, etc) are technical: in particular,
Lisp is happiest when all processes share the same big memory space.
in contrast, as Martin Rogers said in this group almost 2 years ago,

  but what are they talking about?  the reason MS-DOS became a success was
  that all its users were dissatisfied with it and had to hack all sorts of
  useless little trinket programs to make it approach usefulness.  the
  reason Perl has become a success is quite similar: it is obviously
  useful, so people start using it, but it is fundamentall braindamaged, so
  everbody has a good idea for some improvement, the acceptance of which
  makes the system as a whole less useful, but boosts the ego of whoever
  suggested the improvement and makes him a loyal user.  the more bugs a
  design has, the more visible it thus is.  the more it just works and thus
  how invisible it is, the more people don't talk about it.  by such
  measures, that which simply works right, does not get popular, and that
  which is fundamentally broken so people keep complaining about it, gets
  very popular.

* Richard Enwol
|
| evidence that Perl and Python are doing fine: we can estimate popular
| interest in a language by measuring newsgroup traffic.

Perl and Python _are_ doing fine, especially Perl, but Python is
definitely on the rise.

The reason they are doing fine is mainly that they have been hyped a
little (although nowhere near as much as Java) and are associated with
the web. Another is the basic 'coolness' factor.

| I hypothesize that the main reasons for the lack of programmer interest
| in Lisp (CL, Scheme, etc) are technical: [...]

How could they be when hardly anyone knows Lisp? Very few people have
just a passing knowledge of Lisp, although Scheme has been gaining
somewhat due to use in open source projects.

I think part of the problem here is that Lisp users hardly have a web
presence to speak of, there are no repositories of Lisp code, few Lisp
applications available on the web and when Lisp is used nobody seems
to dare mention it. (For example, I tried to look at the NASA remote
agent site to see if the word Lisp was mentioned anywhere. As far as I
could see it was not.)

Marketing-wise Lisp is a stealth language and I think this contributes
to keep the myths from the past alive.

Another problem was pointed out to me by a manager who had actually
programmed Common Lisp at a research institute. Hiring someone to
program in Common Lisp is very different from hiring someone to
program in Python or Java.

Finding someone who knows Java is easy.  Finding someone who knows
Python is difficult, but if you know a mainstream language it only
takes a couple of days before you can start to program, so there's no
real problem. Finding someone who knows Common Lisp is hard and it
takes months to train someone to use it.

  this isn't my experience.  perhaps your manager was looking for Common
  Lisp programmers in the mainstream section of the market?  I also have a
  hard time believing the training period.

  on the other hand, finding a _good_ programmer is damn hard in today's
  market, no matter which language you're targeting, but you can find
  people who claim to know any hyped-up, popular language.  as I have said
  previously, people lie about their Java skills all the time, but still
  get hired.  you can't lie about Common Lisp skills.  perhaps this keeps
  eager newbies out, since a lot of the training you imply would be needed
  for Common Lisp is spent writing production code in Java.

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| Finding someone who knows Common Lisp is hard and it takes months to
| train someone to use it.

* Erik Naggum
|
| this isn't my experience.  perhaps your manager was looking for
| Common Lisp programmers in the mainstream section of the market?  

He was. Like it or not, but that is where the majority of programmers
are. And that company is currently struggling to hire anyone at all,
although I don't really know why.

| I also have a hard time believing the training period.

That was his experience, and from learning it myself and seeing others
struggle to 'get it', I would readily believe his estimate.

| on the other hand, finding a _good_ programmer is damn hard in
| today's market, no matter which language you're targeting,

True.

  this reminds of the drunk who staggered around a lamppost and seemed like
  he looked for something.  a helpful man asks him "are you looking for
  something?"  "yes, my watch!"  the helpful man looks, too, and there's no
  watch to be seen.  "did you lose it here?"  "no, I lost it over there",
  the drunk says and points to a dark doorway.  "but why are you looking
  here?"  "because there's better light here!"

  (I'm not insinuating that your manager was drunk.)

That week is a fairly exhausting experience (for the trainers too!),
and a couple of week-long courses spread over a month or so is
probably better in the abstract, but it is possible to do in a week.

If anyone wants more information they should probably contact me by
mail as any more detail would be perilously close to advertising.