In my frst encounter with Erik I made the same mistakes as you do
now. When I got that episode in perspective I learned quite a lot
about quite a few things. Erik was certainly not the only reason for
this, but he was an important catalyst.

Hints --

* If you do not want Erik to respond to your posts, do not respond to
  him.  Erik *never* as far as i've seen follows up his own posts to
  heap more invective.  Just let it die.  You man say, "but then Erik
  wins!"  So what.  We *all* win by letting this stuff just end.

  If you can't help but answer, just killfile him already.  Don't talk
  about it.  Not to be harsh, but no one else cares.

* Erik has a lot of insight into complex problems.  Ask a technical
  question which you have done some research on (at a minimum look to
  the common lisp hyperspec) and Erik may respond with a very useful
  answer.

* It is also useful just to lurk and read what is going on here.
  There are a lot of very good programmers with years of experience.
  You can learn from them.

* Think about how you ask a question.  Try to find out a bit on your
  own.  Ask humbly, but there's no need to grovel -- i.e., say "I saw
  this but it doens't make sense to me, is this how it should work?"
  instead of "This lanugage is pants because X does it some other
  way."  Lisp does a lot of things differently than other languages.
  Many times there is a very good reason for that.

Seems to me you've got a reasonable awareness of the learning curve,
so I think you'll do fine. You said this class was more using lisp
than teaching it? If so, you're doing the right thing seeking out some
extra info sources. With some perserverence, you'll progess from "why
is this 100 line program so HARD???" to "I can't believe how much I
can do with 100 lines" to "woo hoo!" to "Please don't make me write
this in C++!" in no time.

It's best just to ignore Erik Naggum.  You'll be sucked into a mire of
hostility if you argue with him.

That's one way to think of Lisp documentation strings and declarations,
actually, as attributes of the expression they're attached to!!

-Rob

Here is my way of dealing with this.

Make smallish functions and use the link between your editor and the
running lisp environment.  In emacs with ilisp, I go to the end of a
defun and hit C-c C-e.  This executes the defun and when the compiler
complains there are only a few lines which are in play.  It is then
*much* easier to find the error.

  People who make this argument say something about themselves that smarter
  people than them know well how to interpret.

  The arrogance of people who confuse their opinions with facts is one of
  the things I attack.  You demonstrate quite clearly that there is useful
  distinction between your conclusions and observable reality.  Therefore,
  you are never wrong in your own view, and anyone who counters your claims
  is wrong at best, irrational at worst.  For people who have acquired the
  insight that their conclusions are not identical to reality, but based on
  their limited understanding of a limited part of it at the time, the
  ability to learn from their mistakes follow naturally, as well as their
  ability to deal with people who have observed more or different parts of
  reality than they have.  You clearly lack the prerequisite insight.  This
  has been obvious for years from the snotty remarks you make when you
  think you know the only possible answer and your silence when it becomes
  clear that it was far from the only possible answer.

  People who have learned how to think discover others who share this joy
  and tend to be annoyed with people who have never acquired that skill and
  especially those who consider themselves superior /because/ they believe
  they do not "have to" think, which they consider a dirty practice of
  people who do not automatically know the Truth, like they do.  Pekka P.
  Pirinen has come across as that kind of arrogant ignorant asshole far too
  long to have gone unnoticed as such by those who are /not/ so incredibly
  happy to have found the first answer that they never look any further.

  If you know what you talk about, I listen.  If you do not, and you do not
  listen, either, I may be scathing of your stupidity, because you should
  know better.  Some people never understand what they have done wrong,
  however, because they believe that listening to other people is a waste
  of their valuable time, especially when they prefer their prejudices to
  learning something that may cause them to feel as ignorant as they are.

  Pekka P. Pirinen is one of those lucky men who cannot be taught anything.
  Sadly, he only finds it worth his time to share of his infinite wisdom
  when he can hurt someone with it.  This is the main reason he gets into a
  mire of hostility, like the defectiveness of "Mel" got her into trouble.

  The most tragic part of all is that people like Pekka and "Mel" actually
  believe they are perfect and models for all the rest of mankind and then
  it could not possibly matter to them how evil they are towards others.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

  What on earth possesses a person when he can make such comments about
  other people?  "Sociopath" sure comes to mind as a possible explanation.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

And don't forget <URL:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/The-Story-of-Mel.html>...

Michael, learn something new every day.

--

  Are you quite sure of that?  What are you talking about?

| Meanwhile, this flaming subthread is hardly a triumph for the blunt
| approach.

  Oh, christ.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

 > "Sociopath" sure comes to mind as a possible explanation.

I imagine that Mel can be short for Melvin, for a male, and
Melanie for a female.

Peace,

I think from now on we[1] should point to Tim's article whenever
anyone asks The Standard Clueless Newbie Question (TSCNQ).

Thanks, Tim, for crystalizing so well some vague intuitions I'd
absorbed from the Lisp books & work I've done so far.

-- Larry

On a bright note, I found a definition of "arien" which wholly applies
to you:

   "The word 'humility' will not be found in their lexicon. In their
    climb to power, some will ruthlessly liquidate anyone who stands
    in their way. Such undeveloped Ariens put 'self' first and foremost
    and not a few become megalomaniacs."

The second observation is that you are not letting your editor do the
indentation for you.  You have to let the tools help.  If you were to
use an editor with proper indenting of code (I'm not familiar with the
LispWorks editor), you would have seen:

[1]  (defun myFunction (myList)
       (cond ((listp myList)
              (myfunction (cdr (myList))))
             (t nil)))

[2]  (defun myFunction (myList)
       (cond ((listp myList)
              (myfunction (cdr (myList)))))
       (t nil))

In example [1], all of the test clauses of the COND are aligned
underneath each other.  That is the correct version, since you want the
LISTP test and the T test to be at the same level.  In example [2], you
can easily see the error, since the T is at the same level as the COND.

You get the same effect with other languages, such as Java.  It is not
always immediately obvious where things are missing in Java unless you
follow the normal line breaking and indentation conventions either:

       a = 3*b+1001
       c = 5*a;

versus

        a = 3*b+1001 c = 5*a;

In the latter case, Notepad won't help you find the missing semi-colon
because it is missing from the middle of the line.  Now you probably
wouldn't write your Java or C code like this.  Nor should you write Lisp
code without respecting the structure of the program.  The IDEs for
Java, etc. also indent your code, which is invaluable for finding the
misplaced } characters in complicated code, particularly if you have a
lot of conditionals and error handlers.  This may not be so apparent
when doing school assignments, but in real code it gets to be an issue.

By the way, I just took the code from your message and indented it using
Emacs.  There was an observation made in a related parenthesis-bashing
thread a couple months ago that with experience, you end up not focusing
so much on the parentheses, but rather on the indentation structure.
That is why tools help so much.

The second conclusion is to not use variables that you haven't
initialized, but again this is a universal programming truth.

You shouldn't use global variables unless you have very carefully
thought it out, since they open the way for bizarre interactions between
code that is not textually close together.  In some cases it is
expedient to use special variables, but you really shouldn't make them
truly global.  At the top-level of the program section that wishes to
use these variables, they should be bound to a value that you like
(again using LET).  An example:

 (let ((*glist* nil))
   (declare (special *glist*))
   ....
  )

Note also that because of the non-local interaction, most Lisp
programmers have adopted the convention of surrounding their special
variable names with "*" characters.  It signals that one has a variable
with dynamic rather than lexical scope, and makes it easier to
understand the code.

To preempt the question about the lack of hand-holding, one benefit of
it is that it can be quite handy not to have those restrictions during
the early, exploratory phase of program design.  Lisp makes exploratory
programming and debugging much easier by having a lot of flexibility and
access to the code.  The down side is that this flexibility can end up
biting you.

 --
Thomas A. Russ,  USC/Information Sciences Institute          t...@isi.edu    

    PS> I imagine that Mel can be short for Melvin, for a male, and
    PS> Melanie for a female.

Also, mel means honey.

---Vassil.

I'd expect "Mel" to be far more widely used as a male name than as a
female name because "Melvin" is a name that tends to attract
sophomoric ridicule, whereas "Melanie" doesn't.

Kids have been using the insult "He's a Total Melvin" for at least 30
years.  (I've been a recipient of something of the sort a few times.)
That's a good excuse for seeking a name change, in much the way that a
guy called "Gaylord" might well consider suicide...