Looking for Lisp compiler
Lisp Newbie
Windows, develiver executables, have sockets implementation and support
multithreading?
Thank you
Coby Beck
"Lisp Newbie" <wann...@lisp.programmer> wrote in message
news:4PKO9.164844$6k.33...@news1.west.cox.net...
> Is there such thing as free Lisp compiler, that can work under Linux and
> Windows, develiver executables, have sockets implementation and support
> multithreading?
Start at www.lisp.org
Delivering executables is the only thing there I don't know if you can get
for free. Usually it is not really what people need/want anyway.
--
Coby Beck
(remove #\Space "coby 101 @ bigpond . com")
Dave Bakhash
> Delivering executables is the only thing there I don't know if you can
> get for free. Usually it is not really what people need/want anyway.
It's important for a lot of things. To me, the ideal thing is to have a
self-contained executable that depends on as few things as possible
going right. These days, I've found that having the right system
configuration, with the tons of OSs, libraries, application versions,
etc. is becomming harder and harder -- especially in the Unix world.
In a way, Mac OS X + Fink was my attempt to have something as nice as MS
Windows, but at the same time, robust like FreeBSD, and uniform. I
think it wasn't a bad call, but now the problem is that LispWorks
doesn't run on Mac OS X. ACL does, except for the GUI stuff (which I
don't really care about anyway). But getting back to the main story...
...delivering an executable is the end result of what you want to do
with a Lisp application in many cases. In the case of LispWorks, for
example, you can export your application with some of the basic tools
you use during development (e.g. the editor, and a listener). While the
delivered image isn't too tiny in these cases, it's nice to deliver such
a product, and make use of of it all.
My company, for example, delivers not only our core application, but a
built-in listener, editor, and event log console that make use of the LW
development environment. I think there's a lot of value in that (at
least for companies that sell tools).
dave
Marc Spitzer
> "Coby Beck" <cb...@mercury.bc.ca> writes:
>
> > Delivering executables is the only thing there I don't know if you can
> > get for free. Usually it is not really what people need/want anyway.
>
> It's important for a lot of things. To me, the ideal thing is to have a
> self-contained executable that depends on as few things as possible
> going right. These days, I've found that having the right system
> configuration, with the tons of OSs, libraries, application versions,
> etc. is becomming harder and harder -- especially in the Unix world.
I agree the big honken static exe is a good thing, especially now
with disk and ram so cheap, iff you are distributing commercial
software. Otherwise it is not that important.
>
> ...delivering an executable is the end result of what you want to do
> with a Lisp application in many cases. In the case of LispWorks, for
> example, you can export your application with some of the basic tools
> you use during development (e.g. the editor, and a listener). While the
> delivered image isn't too tiny in these cases, it's nice to deliver such
> a product, and make use of of it all.
Yes in almost all commercial, especially shrink rapped, software. Now
if you want do a commercial thing you should be willing, happy even,
to pay vendors money to help you make money. The creation of an exe
in one of the things that I would generally consider a necessary part
of commercial development. Otherwise it is nice to have, but by no
means necessary for non commercial use.
Now the original poster wanted the ability to create exe file on
linux and windows and he can get it for 900 USD retail, lispworks pro.
Now everything else he can get for free(cmu, ecl, clisp). The ability to
create exe's does not help you do anything but distribute applications
that are no longer lisp code, they are object/byte code and that looks
like a commercial interest to me. I think that commercial software is
a good thing, how else can some one get the software that they need but
no one will enjoy making(among other things).
marc
Dave Bakhash
> Now everything else he can get for free(cmu, ecl, clisp). The ability
> to create exe's does not help you do anything but distribute
> applications that are no longer lisp code, they are object/byte code
> and that looks like a commercial interest to me.
I might be misunderstanding your post, but I know that at least ecl can
pretty much dump out an executable that actually _is_ compiled by
(g)cc. You can write something in CL using ECL and without close
inspection one would never guess that it was done in CL (except insofar
as it didn't crash).
dave
Peter Seibel
> "Lisp Newbie" <wann...@lisp.programmer> wrote in message
> news:4PKO9.164844$6k.33...@news1.west.cox.net...
> > Is there such thing as free Lisp compiler, that can work under Linux and
> > Windows, develiver executables, have sockets implementation and support
> > multithreading?
>
> Start at www.lisp.org
>
> Delivering executables is the only thing there I don't know if you
> can get for free. Usually it is not really what people need/want
> anyway.
Supposing for a moment that not everyone who *thinks* they need/want
to deliver a standalone executable is totally on crack (and it must be
of *some* use as all the commercial vendors seem to have thought it
was worth implementing), can anyone describe more or less what
strategies are used in implementations that do generate standalone
executables? Maybe someone (maybe me) will say, hmmm, that doesn't
sound too hard and will figure out how to hack it into their favorite
free Lisp. Then the standard answer to this question could change
from, "you don't really want that and if you do really want it you
have to buy it" to "you don't really want that but if you do, you can
buy it or get it for free in implementation XXX."
FWIW, I imagine that in an implementation that compiles to native
machine code (CMUCL and SBCL as I understand it) building an
executable would presumably involve generating some wrapper code that
compiles into something that looks like what you get with a simple C
program with a 'int main()' function which in turn calls into some
entry point that the programmer specifies somehow and which is linked
against a library containing the lisp runtime support. Obviously if
it's going to a absolutely standalone executable this all needs to be
statically linked but I can imagine that some folks would also like
having the lisp runtime dynamically linked if they're going to have a
bunch of lisp apps running separately.
In a bytecode based implementation (CLISP, again, if I understand
correctly) presumably a "standalone app" would have to be a bundle of
the CLISP vm plus the generated bytecodes. Again, folks with lots of
apps might appreciate an option that lets them install the VM once per
computer (or user per computer perhaps) rather than once per app.
Perhaps a starting point for this approach might be something like
what Sun has tried to do with the JRE (Java Runtime Environment).
Is that more or less how it would go or are there other better ways to
do it? And finally, does anyone who currently works on any of the free
Lisps care to say whether this kind of "enhancement" would in fact be
considered desirable in their implementation.
-Peter
--
Peter Seibel
pe...@javamonkey.com
Pascal Costanza
> In a bytecode based implementation (CLISP, again, if I understand
> correctly) presumably a "standalone app" would have to be a bundle of
> the CLISP vm plus the generated bytecodes. Again, folks with lots of
> apps might appreciate an option that lets them install the VM once per
> computer (or user per computer perhaps) rather than once per app.
> Perhaps a starting point for this approach might be something like
> what Sun has tried to do with the JRE (Java Runtime Environment).
On Mac OS X, you can install CLISP and OpenMCL via fink. I don't think
it's too much to ask for from users who want to use "free" software to
require them to deal with fink. I guess, similar solutions are available
for Linux. I don't know about other Unixes or Windows in that regard.
Pascal
--
Pascal Costanza University of Bonn
mailto:cost...@web.de Institute of Computer Science III
http://www.pascalcostanza.de Römerstr. 164, D-53117 Bonn (Germany)
Paolo Amoroso
wrote:
> Delivering executables is the only thing there I don't know if you can get
> for free. Usually it is not really what people need/want anyway.
Popular open-source implementations such as CLISP and CMU CL (and I also
guess SBCL) are able to deliver standalone applications. The process is not
automated, but it just involves shipping a few files to the customer:
1) the Lisp executable
2) the dumped image of the application
3) a small shell script that runs #1 and passes it #2 as an argument
The CLISP documentation explains how to deliver applications on all
supported operating systems.
Paolo
--
EncyCMUCLopedia * Extensive collection of CMU Common Lisp documentation
http://www.paoloamoroso.it/ency/README
Paolo Amoroso
wrote:
> was worth implementing), can anyone describe more or less what
> strategies are used in implementations that do generate standalone
> executables? Maybe someone (maybe me) will say, hmmm, that doesn't
One of the main techniques is called "tree shaking".
> FWIW, I imagine that in an implementation that compiles to native
> machine code (CMUCL and SBCL as I understand it) building an
> executable would presumably involve generating some wrapper code that
Some time ago there was some discussion in a CMU CL mailing list on
bundling together all the 3 application components (Lisp executable + core
+ launcher) mentioned in my other post in this thread. I can't remember
whether this has actually been done.
> do it? And finally, does anyone who currently works on any of the free
> Lisps care to say whether this kind of "enhancement" would in fact be
> considered desirable in their implementation.
I guess the maintainers of open-source Common Lisp implementations consider
desirable everything that someone is willing to contribute :)
Peter Seibel
> On Fri, 27 Dec 2002 06:29:51 GMT, Peter Seibel <pe...@javamonkey.com>
> wrote:
>
> > was worth implementing), can anyone describe more or less what
> > strategies are used in implementations that do generate standalone
> > executables? Maybe someone (maybe me) will say, hmmm, that doesn't
>
> One of the main techniques is called "tree shaking".
I've heard that term before and infer that it means taking an image
and starting from some entry point (or points) shaking off all the
unused bits of code (anything not reachable from the transative
closure of called code starting from the entry points) so as to reduce
the size of the image and then dumping it. Is that more or less right?
> > do it? And finally, does anyone who currently works on any of the
> > free Lisps care to say whether this kind of "enhancement" would in
> > fact be considered desirable in their implementation.
>
> I guess the maintainers of open-source Common Lisp implementations
> consider desirable everything that someone is willing to contribute
> :)
You think? Cool--I'll "contribute" my patch that "fixes" all those
annoying (to me) coding idioms in implementation X. Do you think the
maintainers of X will consider *that* patch desirable? ;-)
Seriously though, I asked because there are enough people here on
c.l.l. who seem to believe that "you don't really want that feature"
that it's possible there would be folks with strong philosophical
objections. Which is fine. I just wouldn't want anyone (maybe me) to
spend the time working on some code only to have it turned down
because it doesn't fit with the philosophy of a given project.
Marc Spitzer
Yes ecls does do that on posix systems( I never meant to imply it could
not) but not on windows and the original poster wanted both. To go off
on a bit of a tangent I could see ecl used in several cool projects,
an apache module like mod_perl or a stored procedure language for
postgres for example or clxemacs which you are interested in.
My main point was that the win/linux exe thing was a
distribution/commercial request and when that happens you really want
a vendor and a support contract with said vendor. You see I would
want to have someone who knows much more about the CL I am using be
bound under contract to care about my problems, for a fixed fee.
This way I get work arounds and patches and features that I need
but are not fun or interesting to do, a large amount of high quality
documentation presented in a consistent format comes to mind.
marc
Pascal Bourguignon
The point is that software with freedom is not antinomic to contract
support. On the contrary. How could you offer contract support for a
commercial product you don't have the sources? Or you're not allowed
to modify the sources?
So, you may shop at the monopoly of contract support offered by the
closed proprietary implementation, or at the various competting
contract support offers for free software.
Moreover, guess who will have the most pressure to help you resolve a
problem, the developper of commercial tools who have thousands or tens
of thousands customers and who is busy developping the next version to
be able to charge the upgrade price, or the small shop dedicated
support team who will have a couple dozen of custmers and for whom
you'll be relatively a much more important customer?
--
__Pascal_Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
There is a fault in reality. do not adjust your minds. -- Salman Rushdie
Marc Spitzer
>
> The point is that software with freedom is not antinomic to contract
> support. On the contrary. How could you offer contract support for a
> commercial product you don't have the sources? Or you're not allowed
> to modify the sources?
I do not and that is pretty self evident.
>
> So, you may shop at the monopoly of contract support offered by the
> closed proprietary implementation, or at the various competting
> contract support offers for free software.
Well the only place that I have seen this is with linux distributions
and the first thing they will tell you is you need to get into a
supported configuration. If you contract with red hat you run red hat
or you get no help. If you compile the newest glibc from source and
call them they will say put our supported version in place or we can
not help you under your contract. If you want us to look at it, it
will be time & materials and can I please have a credit card number.
>
> Moreover, guess who will have the most pressure to help you resolve a
> problem, the developper of commercial tools who have thousands or tens
> of thousands customers and who is busy developping the next version to
> be able to charge the upgrade price, or the small shop dedicated
> support team who will have a couple dozen of custmers and for whom
> you'll be relatively a much more important customer?
>
this is just ignorant, do the math. Let's say a support contract for
open source product X is 5,000 USD/year and you have 5, not 2, dozen
customers. This gives you 300,000 USD/year. Now you need to pay for
office space, 800 phone service, commercial grade internet connection,
handle billing and collections, if you take credit cards they take
their cut off the top and so does paypal. We have not even gotten to
the point of hiring the people needed to do the support work yet and
much of the money is gone, I will be nice 1/3 is gone. I am counting
the commission on the sale that the sales person gets up front, lets
say 10% . Now you need to hire people to actually do tech support. to
have 16x7 coverage on the phone requires a min of 3 people, 2 work m-f
and 1 does 2 doubles on the weekend(40k/person gross cost not just
pay), you now have 80k USD left. I forgot to take out the commission
on the sales, another 30k, 50k left. So now you can get 1 more person
to answer the phones, you cannot afford a Sr./Guru type person with
the money and you would need at least 2 of them, think vacation/sick days
and people leave. With 2 1/2 times your customer base it still makes
no sence.
Now on to the tech issues:
1: you get me a patch and it it not accepted in to the source code of
the product I am using.
2: You only support the current version (or an older version) of the
product that I cannot use for other reasons, I can only do apache 1.x
because the modules I use are not thread safe and you now only support
apache 2.x
3: you go out of business, I have no support
Oh yea, I forgot *Taxes* and *Fees*.
marc
Ng Pheng Siong
> Moreover, guess who will have the most pressure to help you resolve a
> problem, the developper of commercial tools who have thousands or tens
> of thousands customers and who is busy developping the next version to
> be able to charge the upgrade price, or the small shop dedicated
> support team who will have a couple dozen of custmers and for whom
> you'll be relatively a much more important customer?
Sir, you need to upgrade that black and white television of yours. The
upgrade price isn't much.
--
Ng Pheng Siong <ng...@netmemetic.com> * http://www.netmemetic.com
Pascal Bourguignon
ng...@netmemetic.com (Ng Pheng Siong) writes:
> According to Pascal Bourguignon <p...@informatimago.com>:
> > Moreover, guess who will have the most pressure to help you resolve a
> > problem, the developper of commercial tools who have thousands or tens
> > of thousands customers and who is busy developping the next version to
> > be able to charge the upgrade price, or the small shop dedicated
> > support team who will have a couple dozen of custmers and for whom
> > you'll be relatively a much more important customer?
>
> Sir, you need to upgrade that black and white television of yours. The
> upgrade price isn't much.
Yes, sorry if I sound caricatural, but I can only compare the support
I've never been able to get from Microsoft/Sony for the Vaio of my
niece (for a MS-Windows-Me problem) vs. the bugs in NeXTSTEP BSD layer
that never have been corrected in any new version (at least Apple
freed Darwin) vs. the support and maintainance I get (and give)
everyday on usenet for GPL'ed or BSD'ed software.
Marc Spitzer
>
> Moreover, guess who will have the most pressure to help you resolve a
> problem, the developper of commercial tools who have thousands or tens
> of thousands customers and who is busy developping the next version to
> be able to charge the upgrade price, or the small shop dedicated
> support team who will have a couple dozen of custmers and for whom
> you'll be relatively a much more important customer?
I forgot something here it is:
A company gains reputation by having good customer support, but good
support costs money so you do not want your customers to use it. And
if they do you want to take care of it as quickly as possible and at
the lowest level in the organization as possible, web sites are where
they want you to go first. So I would expect a company that has lots
of customers to want to fix bugs and in the interim come up with work
arounds for the issues until a patch can be released and then get the
info on the website or level 1 phone support, its cheaper.
Also I am not talking about MS shrink rap crap when I talk about
support. When I think of a support/maintenance contract I am thinking
about things like hp-ux or openview or oracle or solaris etc. Those
products when you pay for support you get all new releases that happen
during the course of the contract as a matter of course, oracle does
split upgrade license from support license though.
If a CL vendor starts to shit on his customers they can and will go
else where. There are 3 commercial vendors for linux/unix(allegro,
lispworks, scl) the same is true for windows. This is not true for
VB. And this is not counting all the free CL's out there(cmu, sbcl,
ecl, openmcl, clisp)
And I do not care who feels the most pressure, I care who gives me the
best information in a timely manner. If I call big lisp vendor and
the level 1 phone support person says " I will mail you a link that
explains the problem and the work around, it in the website, and a
patch is making it through QA as we speak. Would you like an email
alert when it is available for download? thanks and have a nice day"
I am happy and I consider the money I spent very well spent. The
reason for this is it helps me to get my job done in a timely manner
and that is how I make money, not pressuring some other guy who is
trying to fix a problem he has never seen before and who's company has
no reason to invest in a website like "big CL vendor" does, because
there is no economy of scale for the little guy that presents a
compelling business to spend the money to develop and maintain such a
site.
marc
Pascal Bourguignon
> Pascal Bourguignon <p...@informatimago.com> writes:
>
> >
> > The point is that software with freedom is not antinomic to contract
> > support. On the contrary. How could you offer contract support for a
> > commercial product you don't have the sources? Or you're not allowed
> > to modify the sources?
>
> I do not and that is pretty self evident.
>
> >
> > So, you may shop at the monopoly of contract support offered by the
> > closed proprietary implementation, or at the various competting
> > contract support offers for free software.
>
> Well the only place that I have seen this is with linux distributions
> and the first thing they will tell you is you need to get into a
> supported configuration. If you contract with red hat you run red hat
> or you get no help. If you compile the newest glibc from source and
> call them they will say put our supported version in place or we can
> not help you under your contract. If you want us to look at it, it
> will be time & materials and can I please have a credit card number.
The point is that any and all unix/linux experts could maintain a
linux installation either as external contractee or internal
employees, depending on your needs. The point is that RedHat gave you
a quote, and now you can shop and find other linux experts who could
maintain your patched installation, while this would not be possible
at all with proprietary software.
Because Microsoft or the other big software editors do offer support
for custom patched software?
> 2: You only support the current version (or an older version) of the
> product that I cannot use for other reasons, I can only do apache 1.x
> because the modules I use are not thread safe and you now only support
> apache 2.x
> 3: you go out of business, I have no support
Oops. Hopefully, then you'll be able to choose between the 11000
"linux consulting" offers returned by:
Or the 42000 "linux support" offers returned by:
I don't doubt that amongst those 42000 hits you'll be able to find a
corporation more supple than RedHat on the patch and customization
side of your problem.
> Oh yea, I forgot *Taxes* and *Fees*.
>
> marc
--
__Pascal_Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
There is a fault in reality. Do not adjust your minds. -- Salman Rushdie
Marc Spitzer
> Marc Spitzer <mspi...@optonline.net> writes:
>
> > Pascal Bourguignon <p...@informatimago.com> writes:
>
> The point is that any and all unix/linux experts could maintain a
> linux installation either as external contractee or internal
> employees, depending on your needs. The point is that RedHat gave you
> a quote, and now you can shop and find other linux experts who could
> maintain your patched installation, while this would not be possible
> at all with proprietary software.
We are back to time and materiels. This means I do not have a fixed
cost for support. And now I am now, as a business person, trying to
figure out who is a linux/unix expert, a recipee for success. And
what you are talking about is system administration not tech support.
The reason this is a problem is now you have forked the code to
add/fix the feature you needed. You now have your own source tree/set
of patches to maintain until you decide to get back with everyone
else. This costs money and leads to more points of failure.
> > 2: You only support the current version (or an older version) of the
> > product that I cannot use for other reasons, I can only do apache 1.x
> > because the modules I use are not thread safe and you now only support
> > apache 2.x
> > 3: you go out of business, I have no support
>
> Oops. Hopefully, then you'll be able to choose between the 11000
> "linux consulting" offers returned by:
>
The money I have for support is spent, to get these people to support
me I need to pay them right? Now I go to my boss and say "Boss Bobo's
linux support is dead and I need more money to go with louies linux
support", boss says " I have to talk to my boss for the money". So
now my boss looks stupid to his boss at the very least. From all
levels above me the shit/question rolls down "why did you not use
red hat for support? They are still in business." Now this is a fair
question that I need to have a good answer for or I stand a good
chance of taking a hit on my review/contract renewal. I just do not
have the problem if I go with the vendor.
> http://www.google.com/search?as_q=&num=100&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=Linux+consulting&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=lang_en&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=m3&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=.com&safe=images
>
>
> Or the 42000 "linux support" offers returned by:
>
> http://www.google.com/search?q=+%22Linux+support%22+site%3A.com&btnG=Google+Search&num=100&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&as_qdr=m3&as_qdr=m3
>
> I don't doubt that amongst those 42000 hits you'll be able to find a
> corporation more supple than RedHat on the patch and customization
> side of your problem.
>
see above for why keeping your own patches around is not the best
idea. If I was going to do that I would probably use IBM( even
bigger then Red Hat), but they now have moved on to their own
distribution for use with their rack mount pc's.
You see once I start using a custom, as in using source code not at
"where you get kernels" is not a good idea for small operations to
do. With red hat and IBM economies of scale kick in.
marc
Rahul Jain
> You think? Cool--I'll "contribute" my patch that "fixes" all those
> annoying (to me) coding idioms in implementation X. Do you think the
> maintainers of X will consider *that* patch desirable? ;-)
For all values of X where X = SBCL, you have a good shot ;)
Actually, there is some talk of merging SBCL with CMUCL, since the
refactoring done by SBCL is resulting in some huge portability benefits,
and there are cases where people using SBCL want to use some of the
"extras" provided by CMUCL such as the UNIX package, etc.
--
Rahul Jain
Paolo Amoroso
wrote:
> was worth implementing), can anyone describe more or less what
> strategies are used in implementations that do generate standalone
> executables? Maybe someone (maybe me) will say, hmmm, that doesn't
Another relevant source of information is the paper "Delivering the Goods
with Lisp", by Barber and Imlah, in the Sep 1991 issue of CACM.
Paolo Amoroso
wrote:
> Popular open-source implementations such as CLISP and CMU CL (and I also
> guess SBCL) are able to deliver standalone applications. The process is not
> automated, but it just involves shipping a few files to the customer:
The procedure for CMU CL is explained in this comp.lang.lisp articles:
See also the messages in thread "Program Delivery" posted to the cmucl-help
mailing list, in particular:
Thomas F. Burdick
Just because it hasn't been pointed out already, it doesn't take a
genius to make something that feels like a native executable from a
native VM executable plus a core and one or more fasl's, at least on
unix. Modifying CMUCL's vm to look for things in different places
isn't very hard. Call the resulting binary "myapp" instead of "lisp",
and you're done.
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
/ / `-----------------------'
( -. |
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
Lisp Newbie
CLISP doesn't qualify to my original requirements due to lack of
multithreading.
So what else is left among freebies?
"Thomas F. Burdick" <t...@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU> wrote in message
news:xcv8yya...@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU...
Tim Daly, Jr.
> On Fri, 27 Dec 2002 06:29:51 GMT, Peter Seibel <pe...@javamonkey.com>
> wrote:
>
> > was worth implementing), can anyone describe more or less what
> > strategies are used in implementations that do generate standalone
> > executables? Maybe someone (maybe me) will say, hmmm, that doesn't
>
> Another relevant source of information is the paper "Delivering the Goods
> with Lisp", by Barber and Imlah, in the Sep 1991 issue of CACM.
>
Are you and I looking at the same "paper"? They prattle for a mere
three pages about how slow their PS/2 was and how they could maybe
have used this product or maybe have used that product... Not a word
about strategies for generating standalone executables.
Not that I can't sympathize about the PS/2. Man, those things sucked.
-Tim
Erik Naggum
| Yes, sorry if I sound caricatural, but I can only compare the
| support I've never been able to get from Microsoft/Sony for the
| Vaio of my niece (for a MS-Windows-Me problem) vs. the bugs in
| NeXTSTEP BSD layer that never have been corrected in any new
| version (at least Apple freed Darwin) vs. the support and
| maintainance I get (and give) everyday on usenet for GPL'ed or
| BSD'ed software.
So what you need is to become a customer of a commercial enterprise
that provides much /better/ service than you can get with the Free
Software and you would instantly change your mind? Some of us have
had that experience. I strongly suggest that you accept that people
can actually have happy experiences with commercial software despite
your unhappy experiences and therefore find your caricature damning
for you, not for the commercial software you have yet to experience.
What is so tragic about so many (rabid) Free Software adherents is
that they remain Microsoft victims even when they decry its evil.
It is not unlike freeing slaves whose slave psychology remains, and
instead of experiencing the liberty to partake in the possibilities
before them and enjoy the freedom to fail without punishment and
reap the benefits of their success, they cling to the security of
knowing the outcome of their actions as determined by their master,
and so freedom presents them with problems, not opportunities. The
Microsoft victims truly believe that Free Software is the solution
to their problems, but their problem was getting no support and now
they think software must be free in order to get good support. It
is all hogwash! This is not what Free Software was about! This is
not the reason people fight for Free Software! Microsoft does not
even /exist/ in the Free Software universe -- Microsoft is entirely
irrelevant. Whether Microsoft provides shitty or no service is of
/zero/ consequence in the Free Software universe. Free Software is
not about support at all. Using it as an argument is specious at
best. Free Software is about your ability qua user to look under
the hood. That (or if) you can hire somebody do this for you is
entirely immaterial. The freedom to ask somebody to do something
for you in exchange for another service or money is an aspect of
the environment in which Free Software exists, but the freedom to
look under the hood is essentially disconnected from this aspect.
Once bitten, twice shy, the saying goes, but it appears to me that
many people are of the "bitten, thence shy" persuasion, and it is
as impossible to change their mind as it is to unbite them. The
doctrine of forming all of one's opinions after the first encounter
with anything is well known under a variety of names, all nasty and
properly derisive of those who succumb to it, but until and unless
many people understand that they do in fact subscribe to it, they
appear to believe they have a right to an opinion about that which
they have yet to experience based on what they have experienced so
far. Some even claim that this lunacy is "scientific" and that one
cannot escape prejudice. Again, hogwash! People can /think/ and
they can make new choices without any obligation to tell you about
it, so no amount of "historic evidence" can predict the future of
someone's choices, very much unlike physics. To become satisfied
that you have seen all there is to see from someone is the ultimate
disrespect towards that person. Most people acknowledge this when
they face the naked facts, but still return to this loathsome and
vile practice whenever they hope to get away with it, such as when
they deal with "businesses" instead of "people".
Please try to understand that the quality of the support you get is
completely irrelevant to the issue of Free Software. Would you
abandon Free Software as a concept if you got lousy service from
one or even many suppliers? But you abandoned commercial software
because of bad experience with one or a few suppliers of commercial
software? Pardon the passion when I ask you a heartfelt question:
What the hell were you /thinking/? Drawing that kind of conclusion
from that kind of evidence strongly suggests that you are unable to
think clearly and instead try to prop up your emotional conclusions
with delusions of logic, with mere rationalization. You are not
alone in this mind-boggling stupidity, just as there are numerous
people out in the real world who still believe that as soon as they
know somebody's /race/ they can stop learning about them as people.
You should be smart enough to realize that your personal experience
is entirely immaterial as part of a critique of a system, and even
more so to support your negative attitude to future experiences and
those of other people you do not know. You ought to be /ashamed/
of yourself for trying to pull such a fantastically stupid stunt in
a newsgroup of /really/ smart people. The /arrogance/ of trying to
fool people with such mind-numbing idiocy has marked /your/ past
and has obliterated any trust in your thinking ability so far. But
according to the principles I laid down above, you, too, have the
ability to think and make some intelligent choices. Now, hear me
when I tell you that nobody is interested in your past, in what you
believe is your personality or your identity or your personal pride.
You are only your arguments and your articles to this forum, and we
know /nothing/ about you as a person, nor does anybody care. Only
a bigoted idiot would deny /you/ the chance to change your mind and
fix your mistakes. That means that your personal defense of your
past is not suitable for this forum, however strongly you feel the
urge to defend yourself. In a debate, you are /expected/ to learn
when you are mistaken. Being a good debater means that you grasp
the consequences of having your arguments shot down: You re-open
them only if you have a solid argument to support them and refute
the refutation, and attacking those who shot them down /does not/
count in that regard. And please realize this: This debate is not
about what /you/ feel like doing, what /you/ have experienced that
gave rise to your desires, but about something that could apply to
other people with other experiences than yours. Therefore, what
you need to present as an argument is not what you experienced, but
why anyone should care about it.
But, since you have opened this argument in this newsgroup, where
it has been opened hundreds of times before, even though it does
not belong here, the sheer arrogance you display by expressing a
belief that nobody has ever heard /your/ arguments before, I have
also formed a set of expectations about your ability to reason and
think clearly and grasp what you should do to present a coherent
argument to us that is at least /somewhat/ novel in this forum if
you have to discuss such an /off-topic/ issue here to begin with.
That does not mean that you cannot start thinking without telling
me or that you must feel obliged to continue down only one path. I
ask you, implore you, to reconsider whether you think anyone here
is even remotely interested in your personal experiences or has not
heard your pro-Free Software arguments before and whether you could
hope to change anyone else's mind when yours is apparently made up
for good. People here are generally experienced programmers, not a
cobble of newbies who need to be led onto the One True Path by
another newcomer to the newsgroup. When older and wiser people
than you do not accept your self-evident truth, it is time for you
to stop and think: at the very least, it is not self-evident, and
it may not even be the truth. Another thing you might want to
consider is that those who want to discuss the programming language
(family|Common) Lisp may simply ignore you and hope you go away,
and that those who respond to you are just really pissed off that
we have yet /another/ Free Software zealot waste everyone's time
with this non-issue in this forum. The desire to have everyone
else agree to one's personal opinion may run strong in some people,
but it has no place in a programming language forum, no matter how
strongly felt the opinion or its gravity to the world in general.
Those who want do discuss this issue are generally found over in
gnu.misc.discuss.
As a personal advice to you, I would very strongly suggest that you
adopt a different attitude. Try some humility towards people you
do not know -- they may be the people who some day decide your very
future, or they may just be the people who could help you, but may
decide not to based on your perceived arrogance and aggressiveness
about what you currently believe and your apparent lack of ability
to listen to people unless they do exactly as you tell them to. If
you see other people as negative or harsh towards you, it is a good
idea to examine what you have done to them first rather than go on
and aggravate matters by doing it again -- people react negatively
for a reason, and insisting that you are faultless tends to annoy
people more than anything else.
--
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.
wni
> You should be smart enough to realize that your personal experience
> is entirely immaterial as part of a critique of a system, and even
> more so to support your negative attitude to future experiences and
> those of other people you do not know.
So it's your experience that counts? What makes you think that you are
qualified to criticize while the other people can't?
> You ought to be /ashamed/
> of yourself for trying to pull such a fantastically stupid stunt in
> a newsgroup of /really/ smart people.
I think you are talking about *you*, the only smart one.
> The /arrogance/ of trying to
> fool people with such mind-numbing idiocy has marked /your/ past
> and has obliterated any trust in your thinking ability so far.
What's idotic about Bourguignon's argument? Don't you build your
arguments from your experience or you don't have any experience
on anything at all? The pretense of objectivity is a dirty trick
you play on your sycophants and horrify innocent people.
> But according to the principles I laid down above, you, too, have the
> ability to think and make some intelligent choices. Now, hear me
> when I tell you that nobody is interested in your past, in what you
> believe is your personality or your identity or your personal pride.
> You are only your arguments and your articles to this forum, and we
> know /nothing/ about you as a person, nor does anybody care.
We are not interested in your opinions, past, and whatever half-cooked,
densely packed dirty laundry of yours. Treating people this way has long
been your scare tactics and the laughing butt of comp.lang.lisp.
> Only
> a bigoted idiot would deny /you/ the chance to change your mind and
> fix your mistakes. That means that your personal defense of your
> past is not suitable for this forum, however strongly you feel the
> urge to defend yourself. In a debate, you are /expected/ to learn
> when you are mistaken.
You are really being patronizing. You have nothing to show why people
should listen to this.
wni at attbi dot com
Marc Spitzer
> Erik Naggum wrote:
>
> > You should be smart enough to realize that your personal experience
> > is entirely immaterial as part of a critique of a system, and even
> > more so to support your negative attitude to future experiences and
> > those of other people you do not know.
>
>
> So it's your experience that counts? What makes you think that you are
> qualified to criticize while the other people can't?
>
No it is his well formulated arguments that count. And I have never
seen him say "do not do it", but I have seen him say "do not do such a
bad job of it"
>
> > You ought to be /ashamed/
> > of yourself for trying to pull such a fantastically stupid stunt in
> > a newsgroup of /really/ smart people.
>
> I think you are talking about *you*, the only smart one.
>
stuck in 3rd grade are we?
> > The /arrogance/ of trying to
> > fool people with such mind-numbing idiocy has marked /your/ past
> > and has obliterated any trust in your thinking ability so far.
>
> What's idotic about Bourguignon's argument? Don't you build your
> arguments from your experience or you don't have any experience
> on anything at all? The pretense of objectivity is a dirty trick
> you play on your sycophants and horrify innocent people.
>
did you try google? He has answered why XML sucks several times.
> > But according to the principles I laid down above, you, too, have the
> > ability to think and make some intelligent choices. Now, hear me
> > when I tell you that nobody is interested in your past, in what you
> > believe is your personality or your identity or your personal pride.
> > You are only your arguments and your articles to this forum, and we
> > know /nothing/ about you as a person, nor does anybody care.
>
> We are not interested in your opinions, past, and whatever half-cooked,
> densely packed dirty laundry of yours. Treating people this way has long
> been your scare tactics and the laughing butt of comp.lang.lisp.
Actually some of us are.
>
> > Only
> > a bigoted idiot would deny /you/ the chance to change your mind and
> > fix your mistakes. That means that your personal defense of your
> > past is not suitable for this forum, however strongly you feel the
> > urge to defend yourself. In a debate, you are /expected/ to learn
> > when you are mistaken.
>
>
> You are really being patronizing. You have nothing to show why people
> should listen to this.
>
He is right? You are judged here by the work you produce here, posts
mostly but it also includes research. If the original poster had
googled for "Erik xml" in the CLL archives he could have found out why
Erik dislikes xml. And he could have gotten a different response from
Erik by posting a well researched article with counter information
supporting his view that xml does not suck. And if he could not
refute Erik's arguments then perhaps xml does suck after all.
>
> wni at attbi dot com
And since you have been here long enough to know how Erik will respond
to stupid dick head messages like this, you claim long lurker status
above. You must want to start a stupid fuckking shit storm, for no
good reason, that will waste a lot of time and effort.
Please go fuck off, and please do it somewhere else.
marc
ps it is not a full moon out so why start this shit tonight?
Pascal Bourguignon
Marc Spitzer <mspi...@optonline.net> writes:
>
> The money I have for support is spent, to get these people to support
> me I need to pay them right? Now I go to my boss and say "Boss Bobo's
> linux support is dead and I need more money to go with louies linux
> support", boss says " I have to talk to my boss for the money". So
> now my boss looks stupid to his boss at the very least. From all
> levels above me the shit/question rolls down "why did you not use
> red hat for support? They are still in business." Now this is a fair
> question that I need to have a good answer for or I stand a good
> chance of taking a hit on my review/contract renewal. I just do not
> have the problem if I go with the vendor.
The fact is that linux consulting/support corporation are not
necessarily in the insurance business, that is the risk management
business. Big corporations do everything including that. You pay a
prime, and the probabilities are you won't get any 'benefit', you
won't need any support activity.
But you could get an insurance contract with a respected and stable
insurance corporation and then be able to pay for any intervention by
any linux consulting company available at the time the problem occurs.
But then the prime asked by your insurance corporation may hint you
that to get your money worth in support, you'd have to pay much more
than what RedHat and the other ask anyway. I speak of real service,
not shit umbrellas.
Marc Spitzer
> Marc Spitzer <mspi...@optonline.net> writes:
> >
> > The money I have for support is spent, to get these people to support
> > me I need to pay them right? Now I go to my boss and say "Boss Bobo's
> > linux support is dead and I need more money to go with louies linux
> > support", boss says " I have to talk to my boss for the money". So
> > now my boss looks stupid to his boss at the very least. From all
> > levels above me the shit/question rolls down "why did you not use
> > red hat for support? They are still in business." Now this is a fair
> > question that I need to have a good answer for or I stand a good
> > chance of taking a hit on my review/contract renewal. I just do not
> > have the problem if I go with the vendor.
>
> The fact is that linux consulting/support corporation are not
> necessarily in the insurance business, that is the risk management
> business. Big corporations do everything including that. You pay a
> prime, and the probabilities are you won't get any 'benefit', you
> won't need any support activity.
The reason you buy insurance is that when an event happens that can
destroy your business someone else is required to pay for it so you
can recover and continue doing business. The benefit you get is that
you still have a business because you can meet your obligations, you
can reorder the stock that burned up in the fire because of the
insurance check. The freedom from that threat is the benefit.
I would think it depends on what is being insured. Most businesses do
not carry "business continuation" insurance, they carry things like
fire, theft, flood and liability insurance. And for those you are
right the underwriter does not care about tech support for your
business, you are not paying him to cover it. Now if they were
insuring the gross profit from your ecommerce site, ie site can not
transact business(doors are closed) insurer starts cutting checks,
they will look at your operation in great detail. In fact they will
probably require changes in it to reduce down time or just charge you
a (much)higher premium. One thing they might require is 24x7 admin
support, not just operators. Another one is getting Sr management involved
much earlier in the outage then is normal and he has to stay available
for the duration. And real tech support, not Louie's Linux hut.
>
> But you could get an insurance contract with a respected and stable
> insurance corporation and then be able to pay for any intervention by
> any linux consulting company available at the time the problem occurs.
>
And this would cost more or less then just going to redhat or ibm
for a normal or even premium service contract?
> But then the prime asked by your insurance corporation may hint you
> that to get your money worth in support, you'd have to pay much more
> than what RedHat and the other ask anyway. I speak of real service,
> not shit umbrellas.
>
possibly not, remember the first thing asked for is your support contract.
So if you have no contract it is time and materials or to put it another
way 3-400 usd/hour/person also many service organizations have different
levels of contract support and if you have the better contract you get more
help faster and access to more spares that are stashed closer to your site.
And if someone with a contract needs access to the same people that are
working with you they get it, as per the contract and you can wait.
Real support is not cheap, but when the business goes away when the
computer goes away then it is much cheaper then not having it.
marc
Frank A. Adrian
> Real support is not cheap, but when the business goes away when the
> computer goes away then it is much cheaper then not having it.
Yes. And when you really need uptime, you ain't gonna be looking at either
crap Linux OR Windows and the boxes they run on. You're going to be going
with something that has both design for reliability AND support built in.
And that means something old and tested by a company that's been in the
business for more than a few years. Probably something like OS/390 or
OS/400. Yeah, it costs more, but those things stay up. And, if they do
fall down, you got REAL backup.
faa
Paolo Amoroso
> Paolo Amoroso <amo...@mclink.it> writes:
[...]
> > Another relevant source of information is the paper "Delivering the Goods
> > with Lisp", by Barber and Imlah, in the Sep 1991 issue of CACM.
> >
>
> Are you and I looking at the same "paper"? They prattle for a mere
> three pages about how slow their PS/2 was and how they could maybe
> have used this product or maybe have used that product... Not a word
> about strategies for generating standalone executables.
I think we are talking about the same paper. But while you probably have a
copy of it handy, I no longer have it, just a vague recollection. Hence its
alleged relevance and implied usefulness.
Hannah Schroeter
Marc Spitzer <mspi...@optonline.net> wrote:
>[...]
>Yes ecls does do that on posix systems( I never meant to imply it could
>[...]
I've tried to port a current ecls release (0.7b) to OpenBSD/x86 and failed.
Has someone else succeeded in doing so and what changes were needed?
Porting a very old version (0.0g) worked, but things seem to have
changed significantly.
Kind regards,
Hannah.
wni
> wni <w...@nospam.attbi.com> writes:
>
>
>>
>>
>>So it's your experience that counts? What makes you think that you are
>>qualified to criticize while the other people can't?
>>
>
>
> No it is his well formulated arguments that count. And I have never
> seen him say "do not do it", but I have seen him say "do not do such a
> bad job of it"
I fail to see how he did the job better. Stuffing a lot of twisted
sentences with no logic foundation is basically what I see in his
articles. Yes, you can claim and claim and claim on the Usenet without
being critically judged by real experts (who might never read this
group), but that doesn't make you an authority. One particular
silly instance is his attack on Paul Graham's "Being Popular" (
which dismisses Java) but he himself dismissed a lot of languages.
This kind of double standard is what makes him unbearably harsh.
>
>>> But according to the principles I laid down above, you, too, have the
>>> ability to think and make some intelligent choices. Now, hear me
>>> when I tell you that nobody is interested in your past, in what you
>>> believe is your personality or your identity or your personal pride.
>>> You are only your arguments and your articles to this forum, and we
>>> know /nothing/ about you as a person, nor does anybody care.
>>
>>We are not interested in your opinions, past, and whatever half-cooked,
>>densely packed dirty laundry of yours. Treating people this way has long
>>been your scare tactics and the laughing butt of comp.lang.lisp.
>
>
> Actually some of us are.
That's your freedom and nobody will condemn you for that.
>
>
>>> Only
>>> a bigoted idiot would deny /you/ the chance to change your mind and
>>> fix your mistakes. That means that your personal defense of your
>>> past is not suitable for this forum, however strongly you feel the
>>> urge to defend yourself. In a debate, you are /expected/ to learn
>>> when you are mistaken.
>>
>>
>>You are really being patronizing. You have nothing to show why people
>>should listen to this.
>>
>
>
> He is right? You are judged here by the work you produce here, posts
> mostly but it also includes research. If the original poster had
> googled for "Erik xml" in the CLL archives he could have found out why
> Erik dislikes xml. And he could have gotten a different response from
> Erik by posting a well researched article with counter information
> supporting his view that xml does not suck. And if he could not
> refute Erik's arguments then perhaps xml does suck after all.
>
So what makes Mr Naggum the King in opinions that people have to submit
"well researched article?" Last time I checked, I can't find one single
reference to any of his name in
That means he has no acadmic credential for people to believe him. So
we have to dismiss people like Philip Wadler and believe in Erik
Naggum instead? The massive number of "articles" posted by Mr Naggum
are mostly unfounded claims and personal attacks. From my point of
view, some of them made sense but I don't think I have the "high
gound" to judge people working on XML as "stupid."
Yes, Knuth, Perlis, Dijkstra, Hoare, Reyolds, Landin, etc. can
call me "stupid" whenever they want, because they've got credentials.
Alas, they are too smart to do such a thing.
So, who are you guys to judge people? If Mr Naggum has any refereed
paper in either a reputed conference, workshop, (even better) journal
to show us how *well researched* his arguments are, then people might
have the obligation to show him that. Until then, this kind of one
way street is nonsense.
> And since you have been here long enough to know how Erik will respond
> to stupid dick head messages like this, you claim long lurker status
> above. You must want to start a stupid fuckking shit storm, for no
> good reason, that will waste a lot of time and effort.
>
> Please go fuck off, and please do it somewhere else.
>
> marc
>
> ps it is not a full moon out so why start this shit tonight?
>
A lot of people described c.l.l as a private elite club where only
certain class of people are welcome. From the above message, it
seems this *club* has been penetrated by *foul-mouth street gangs*
that blocks the area with such kind of sabre rattling.
Marc Spitzer
> Marc Spitzer wrote:
> > wni <w...@nospam.attbi.com> writes:
> >
>
> >>
> >>
> >>So it's your experience that counts? What makes you think that you are
> >>qualified to criticize while the other people can't?
> >>
> > No it is his well formulated arguments that count. And I have never
> > seen him say "do not do it", but I have seen him say "do not do such
> > a bad job of it"
>
> I fail to see how he did the job better. Stuffing a lot of twisted
> sentences with no logic foundation is basically what I see in his
> articles. Yes, you can claim and claim and claim on the Usenet without
> being critically judged by real experts (who might never read this
> group), but that doesn't make you an authority. One particular
> silly instance is his attack on Paul Graham's "Being Popular" (
> which dismisses Java) but he himself dismissed a lot of languages.
> This kind of double standard is what makes him unbearably harsh.
>
You started this with an out of the blue personnel attack on Erik,
that you chose to do for your own reasons. This is a remarkably
stupid thing to do for anyone who has been here for any length
of time. Unless having someone verbally slap you around and having
this archived now and forever is your idea of fun. If it is please
find another hobby or practice it elsewhere.
And a little well reasoned verbal slapping around is not in any way
shape or form unendurable, it the grand scheme of things it dose not
even count on scale of humanities experience with harshness. Think of
some of the things that were normal for people to endure just a few
hundreds years ago, half or more of your children would die before the
age of 5 for example, which was endured for a long time.
>
> >
>
> >>> But according to the principles I laid down above, you, too, have the
> >>> ability to think and make some intelligent choices. Now, hear me
> >>> when I tell you that nobody is interested in your past, in what you
> >>> believe is your personality or your identity or your personal pride.
> >>> You are only your arguments and your articles to this forum, and we
> >>> know /nothing/ about you as a person, nor does anybody care.
> >>
> >>We are not interested in your opinions, past, and whatever half-cooked,
> >>densely packed dirty laundry of yours. Treating people this way has long
> >>been your scare tactics and the laughing butt of comp.lang.lisp.
> > Actually some of us are.
>
>
> That's your freedom and nobody will condemn you for that.
>
How nice of you to say so.
> >
>
> >>> Only
> >>> a bigoted idiot would deny /you/ the chance to change your mind and
> >>> fix your mistakes. That means that your personal defense of your
> >>> past is not suitable for this forum, however strongly you feel the
> >>> urge to defend yourself. In a debate, you are /expected/ to learn
> >>> when you are mistaken.
> >>
> >>
> >>You are really being patronizing. You have nothing to show why people
> >>should listen to this.
> >>
> > He is right? You are judged here by the work you produce here, posts
>
> > mostly but it also includes research. If the original poster had
> > googled for "Erik xml" in the CLL archives he could have found out why
> > Erik dislikes xml. And he could have gotten a different response from
> > Erik by posting a well researched article with counter information
> > supporting his view that xml does not suck. And if he could not
> > refute Erik's arguments then perhaps xml does suck after all.
> >
>
>
> So what makes Mr Naggum the King in opinions that people have to submit
> "well researched article?" Last time I checked, I can't find one single
> reference to any of his name in
>
> http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs
>
Erik has well thought out and logical reasons for disliking xml that is
why and they are posted. The other guy was I like it so there.
that is why
> That means he has no acadmic credential for people to believe him. So
> we have to dismiss people like Philip Wadler and believe in Erik
> Naggum instead? The massive number of "articles" posted by Mr Naggum
> are mostly unfounded claims and personal attacks. From my point of
> view, some of them made sense but I don't think I have the "high
> gound" to judge people working on XML as "stupid."
>
> Yes, Knuth, Perlis, Dijkstra, Hoare, Reyolds, Landin, etc. can
> call me "stupid" whenever they want, because they've got credentials.
> Alas, they are too smart to do such a thing.
>
So they do not even acknowledge your existence, they are smarter then I.
> So, who are you guys to judge people? If Mr Naggum has any refereed
> paper in either a reputed conference, workshop, (even better) journal
> to show us how *well researched* his arguments are, then people might
> have the obligation to show him that. Until then, this kind of one
> way street is nonsense.
>
Well he has posted them here and they are in google for your reading
pleasure, go read.
> > And since you have been here long enough to know how Erik will respond
> > to stupid dick head messages like this, you claim long lurker status
> > above. You must want to start a stupid fuckking shit storm, for no
> > good reason, that will waste a lot of time and effort.
> > Please go fuck off, and please do it somewhere else.
>
> > marc
>
> > ps it is not a full moon out so why start this shit tonight?
>
> >
>
>
> A lot of people described c.l.l as a private elite club where only
> certain class of people are welcome. From the above message, it
> seems this *club* has been penetrated by *foul-mouth street gangs*
> that blocks the area with such kind of sabre rattling.
>
Well you come here and start throwing verbal shit around because you
felt like it. You then get offended because you are asked to fuck off
and go away. Well fuck off and go away, take the hint this time.
marc
wni
>>
>>A lot of people described c.l.l as a private elite club where only
>>certain class of people are welcome. From the above message, it
>>seems this *club* has been penetrated by *foul-mouth street gangs*
>>that blocks the area with such kind of sabre rattling.
>>
>
>
> Well you come here and start throwing verbal shit around because you
> felt like it. You then get offended because you are asked to fuck off
> and go away. Well fuck off and go away, take the hint this time.
I am really sorry that I wrote *foul-mouth street gangs*. It should
have been *foul-mouth attack dogs*.
You can have the last bark.
Kenny Tilton
> A lot of people described c.l.l as a private elite club where only
> certain class of people are welcome.
Really? I would love some details. People somewhere are sitting around
talking about c.l.l? A /lot/ of people? Do they also talk about Lisp? If
so, what do they say? If not, why are they even reading cll?
I realize you are not speaking strictly, because no un-moderated NG can
be private or elite. Unwelcome would be possible, if the preponderance
of opinion re some poster was so negative that they could not take the
heat and went away. I've seen that happen, with people who were really
off base. Nothing wrong with making bozos feel unwelcome, I hope.
Periodically someone crawls out of the woodlurk to upbraid Erik, but it
is hard to do that without self-referentially despoiling the joint and
they take heat for that. Then, since they had nothing else to offer cl,
they usually just fade away.
As you will (fade away), unless you want to talk about Lisp.
But first, since you have bandied about hearsay accusations against cll,
please now back it up by specifying a few (or one!) threads in which
reasonable people were made to feel unwelcome by the private elite.
We'll wait while you get back to "a lot of people" for those references.
I am really curious because the only folks I have ever seen get into
protracted battles with any cll regular are people willing to engage in
protracted battles, and that is always optional.
--
kenny tilton
clinisys, inc
http://www.tilton-technology.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------
"Cells let us walk, talk, think, make love and realize
the bath water is cold." -- Lorraine Lee Cudmore
Marc Spitzer
A properly trained attack dog make no noise, they don't bark they rip
your throat out. You may be thinking of a guard dog, the noise can be
a deterrent. It depends how they are trained.
woof
marc
Erik Naggum
| So it's your experience that counts?
Was that a question? If so, no, that is /so/ not the point.
| What makes you think that you are qualified to criticize while the
| other people can't?
Well, to be honest, your rather frantic response virtually proves
that I am qualified to criticize and you are not.
Oleg
[ snipped ]
You may find it amusing that a search for
"idiot OR moron OR cretin" in comp.lang.lisp limited to year 2002 returns
102 results. OTOH, a similar search in comp.lang.fortran produces only 9
results; fa.caml - 1; comp.lang.c - 163 (You need to ignore google's
overestimated expectations) *.fortran is 1.5-2 times smaller than *.lisp,
and *.c is about 3 times larger.
I agree with you and Richard Fateman, who started a thread about this a
couple of months ago, that CLL is quite uncivilized. Why it is so is a
mystery.
If you are, say, a caltech professor, and are being attacked by a bunch of
trolls with no high school, your best strategy is to simply ignore them
(there is only one of you and very many of them ;)
Oleg
Marc Spitzer
As one if the people who is being accused of being a high school dropout,
could you please provide proof of this. Or just shut the fuck up and
go away you idiot or moron or creitin.
marc
Geoffrey Summerhayes
"Erik Naggum" <er...@naggum.no> wrote in message news:32502243...@naggum.no...
>
> Well, to be honest, your rather frantic response virtually proves
> that I am qualified to criticize and you are not.
>
That's odd. I feel a sudden impulse to read a Joseph Heller novel...
--
Geoff
Tim Bradshaw
> I realize you are not speaking strictly, because no un-moderated NG
> can be private or elite. Unwelcome would be possible, if the
> preponderance of opinion re some poster was so negative that they
> could not take the heat and went away. I've seen that happen, with
> people who were really off base. Nothing wrong with making bozos feel
> unwelcome, I hope.
The last person who could be thought of as being hounded out of cll
who I can think of was Ilias, although he kind of hounded himself out
- I think by the end that basically no one would talk to him and he
got bored and wandered off. Can anyone - *anyone* - give examples of
someone who really had a lot (or anything) to contribute who was
hounded out?
I think that there are two relevant features of cll which make it
somewhat ruder than (some - by no means all) other groups. (1) There
are a relatively large number of people who turn up with extremely
wrong and very negative views, and who are not interested in learning
the truth. I don't read any other language groups, but I *really*
doubt that the C groups, for instance, get this. (2) Some regular
posters say you are an idiot when they think you are. So what's wrong
with that?
--tim
Pascal Costanza
> I think that there are two relevant features of cll which make it
> somewhat ruder than (some - by no means all) other groups. (1) There
> are a relatively large number of people who turn up with extremely
> wrong and very negative views, and who are not interested in learning
> the truth. I don't read any other language groups, but I *really*
> doubt that the C groups, for instance, get this. (2) Some regular
> posters say you are an idiot when they think you are. So what's wrong
> with that?
wrt (1): This is also the case for some of the regular posters. Some of
them try to defend Common Lisp by all means, and at least one of them
has even stated this as an explicit goal. I fail to see what this has to
do with any notion of "truth".
wrt (2): Some of those alleged idiots are possibly no idiots at all, but
may decide to have something better to do than to repeatedly expose
themselves to abusive language. I'd regard this as a serious loss.
Just my 0.02€.
Pascal
P.S.: I wonder what Common Lisp vendors think about this situation.
After all, anyone that shows some interest in Common Lisp is a potential
customer in the long run, unless scared away prematurely. Or am I
overestimating the impact of newsgroups?
(Some background information: This is my first real newsgroup
experience, and I have only made my first posting in this year's August.
Before that, I have only occasionally touched newsgroups. So I possibly
have wrong expectations...)
--
Pascal Costanza University of Bonn
mailto:cost...@web.de Institute of Computer Science III
http://www.pascalcostanza.de Römerstr. 164, D-53117 Bonn (Germany)
Chris Gehlker
<t...@cley.com> wrote:
> I think that there are two relevant features of cll which make it
> somewhat ruder than (some - by no means all) other groups.
I think there is really only one thing that seems to be particularly
relevant. The sense of some that Lisp is poorly regarded by the programming
community in general. It is, after all, a commonplace that the vehemence
with which people express their views is directly proportional to their
expectation that those views are unpopular.
> (1) There
> are a relatively large number of people who turn up with extremely
> wrong and very negative views, and who are not interested in learning
> the truth.
How do you know whether people are interested in learning the truth when
they "turn up"?
> I don't read any other language groups, but I *really*
> doubt that the C groups, for instance, get this.
I suspect that the number of people who think C is a very flawed language
dwarfs the number of people who think that about Lisp. The difference is
that the C coders simply don't feel threatened by people who don't like C.
-----= Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =-----
http://www.newsfeeds.com - The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World!
-----== Over 80,000 Newsgroups - 16 Different Servers! =-----
Joe Marshall
> We are not interested in your [Erik's] opinions ...
Speak for yourself.
If you have no interest in Erik's opinions, why do you read them?
Joe Marshall
> P.S.: I wonder what Common Lisp vendors think about this
> situation. After all, anyone that shows some interest in Common Lisp
> is a potential customer in the long run, unless scared away
> prematurely.
And stupid, idiotic, or moronic people are more easily separated from
their money.
Erik Naggum
| I agree with you and Richard Fateman, who started a thread about
| this a couple of months ago, that CLL is quite uncivilized. Why it
| is so is a mystery.
Suppose people suddenly became friendly in comp.lang.lisp. Would
you be able to notice it or would you still project animosity and
hostility onto others so you could have an excuse to keep hating?
Do you trouble-starters have any concept of personal responsibility
or any idea of your ability to /change/ the climate by shutting up?
This forum is uncivilized because uncivilized people think it is OK
to be uncivilized here. If you really want to know, ask "wni" why
he felt no compunctions about posting /his/ hostility. Normal and
well-adjusted people have an element of restraint that he and those
like him lack, and which furthermore means that their indignation
is not only everybody's business, but that telling them to curtail
/their/ abuse of this forum is grounds for further indignation. If
anyone still objects to my characterization of these people by
their rightful name: morons, please explain why what they do is not
utterly devoid of every symptom of intelligence.
Get rid of the people who believe this forum exists to share their
opinions on how well the forum functions, and it /will/ function.
The solution is pretty simple: Stay focused on what you believe the
forum should be about; exhibit concentration and goal-directedness;
exercise restraint; demonstrate your ability to act in accordance
with your own convictions regarding behavior in public; apply your
intelligence and stop doing things that exacerbate the situations
you do not desire and do things that would ameliorate it instead;
realize that if you cannot do it yourself, demanding it of others
is not only morally bankrupt, it demonstrates that the purpose of
the demands is to make someone the fall guy instead of accepting
responsibility for one's own behavior, so it can be improved -- all
they actually want is to blame someone for their own shortcomings,
and they should not be surprised that the fall guy objects to this
unjustness. Clean up your own act and show the world that /you/
can behave, and all the problems will simply go away on their own.
Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
> (2) Some regular posters say you are an idiot when they think you
> are. So what's wrong with that?
The ensuing "discussions" are tedious in the extreme.
--
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
la...@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
Joe Marshall
> Supposing for a moment that not everyone who *thinks* they need/want
> to deliver a standalone executable is totally on crack (and it must be
> of *some* use as all the commercial vendors seem to have thought it
> was worth implementing), can anyone describe more or less what
> strategies are used in implementations that do generate standalone
> executables?
All lisp systems have *some* basic executable component. The typical
bootstrapping strategy is to write the lisp runtime support as an
executable (for instance, as a C program) then using this basic
support, load the rest of the lisp system (either having
cross-compiled the lisp sources into fasl files, or by loading the
lisp compiler source code into a bootstrap interpreter and having it
compile itself first). This is often called `cold loading' the lisp
system.
Once all the code is loaded into the system, the usual next step is to
produce a `dump' of the heap. This usually involves something like
writing out all the allocated storage into a file. When the basic
lisp executable is next run, you either provide it the location of the
image, or it searches for it in known locations.
A `standalone executable' (as what people seem to want) is a file that
the native operating system linker/loader can launch. I.e., it is a
PECOFF file on Windows, an ELF file on Linux, etc. etc. These file
formats are fairly flexible in that you can generally add arbitrary
`sections' to them. The OS linker/loader will map each section into
memory and then the executable code can go about finding out where it
is.
So a trivial way of creating a `standalone executable' is to more or
less concatenate the `bootstrap executable' with a `dumped image'. In
fact, there are lisps which do almost exactly that (you have to adjust
the resulting COFF or ELF file so that checksums and tables match up,
but otherwise they are just concatenating the files).
There is no material difference between providing a `standalone
executable' and providing a `set of files'. The only difference is
that in one case the hierarchy is a `directory' composed of `files',
and the other case is a `COFF' or `ELF' file composed of `sections'.
If you deliver the package in a `zip' or `tar' archive, the hierarchy,
whatever it is, is hidden in a single compressed unit.
So when someone says `I *need* a standalone executable' what they are
saying is `it is essential to me that I don't see the software
components when I use the ls command. Make me use some sort of ELF or
COFF image dumper instead.' This is a ludicrous requirement. If you
don't want to see the components, don't look at them.
Since these people seem to be reasonably comfortable with delivering
software as `dll's, the requirement seems even *less* sensical: I
only want to see extensions like `exe' and `dll' in my software, I
don't want to see `fasl' and `dump' or `image'.
Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll
aunlau$h0l$1...@c3po.schlund.de...
> I've tried to port a current ecls release (0.7b) to OpenBSD/x86 and
failed.
> Has someone else succeeded in doing so and what changes were needed?
Can you be more explicit about the difficulties? Maybe through private mail?
(wo...@arrakis.es) OpenBSD is one of the platforms I lack for testing.
However porting should be straightforward in the x86 platform -- I myself
ported ECLS to NetBSD long ago, although I could not maintain that platform
because my old NetBSD box died long ago.
Best regards
Juanjo
Erik Naggum
| wrt (1): This is also the case for some of the regular posters.
| Some of them try to defend Common Lisp by all means, and at least
| one of them has even stated this as an explicit goal. I fail to
| see what this has to do with any notion of "truth".
I have never seen that happen. Could you point me to at least a few
examples where you believed this to take place? Note that you have
a pretty lousy track record of getting people's intentions right and
that my willingness to take your word for it when you make this kind
of extremely rude claim is exactly zero (and in your inimical style
remove every shred of the target of your slander). Your impression
is not necessarily the pure and unadulterated truth just because it
is your personal experience. You arrive at "conclusions" about how
other people feel and what their intentions are, and you annoy the
hell out of me, at least, by insisting that you are right about this
and that the people you make these claims about shall not correct
you. As for the statement of explicit goal, dig it up and quote it.
If you have to chicken out of actually naming the people you talk
/about/, you indicate to the whole world that you no longer have (if
you ever had) any interest in /dialog/ with them, and that is the
kind of rudeness you have pretty clearly indicated that /you/ do not
like when it happens to others. One would have thought that you, of
all people, would at least pay attention to such things, but no.
| P.S.: I wonder what Common Lisp vendors think about this situation.
No, you don't. You say this only to affect people how people feel.
| Or am I overestimating the impact of newsgroups?
Yes, and you have still to figure out that this is a /technical/
forum. I doubt that you even know what a technical forum is.
| (Some background information: This is my first real newsgroup
| experience, and I have only made my first posting in this year's
| August. Before that, I have only occasionally touched newsgroups.
| So I possibly have wrong expectations...)
Not only expectations, but preconceptions that cannot be changed by
facts, and you simply /cannot/ keep quiet about them. What makes
you think that your behavior is not massively annoying and so scares
away much more people than any other cause you think is evil? You
go out of your way to post off-topic drivel and make claims about
other people that you cannot possibly know, and you are adamant that
you are not part of the problem. This fact alone pisses people off.
Some people actually /listen/ before they talk and try to grasp the
ambiance in a group before they pronounce their judgment and seek to
change it to their liking. The other Pascal also fails to do that,
As do several past whiners and feelers. This is not a coincidence.
Please tell us why you could not control yourself and just /had/ to
chip in with your vague, yet specifically /negative/, bullshit.
What happened to that philosophy of yours about spewing feel-good
crap so people felt included? You demonstrate that you suffer from
exactly the same problem you attack others for so cowardly: the
incredibly primitive us-vs-them tribal attitude. Upgrade yourself!
Become a /thinking/ human being, and grow the hell up so you can
start to assume responsibility for your /own/ behavior.
Consider whether this forum benefits from yet more drivel from you,
or whether it would really be improved a lot more if you shut up
about your feelings and acted according to your own rules, instead
of demanding that only the people you dislike do that.
Pascal Costanza
> Your impression
> is not necessarily the pure and unadulterated truth just because it
> is your personal experience.
Correct.
> As for the statement of explicit goal, dig it up and quote it.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3208226254834485%40naggum.net&output=gplain
Here is an excerpt:
"There are some people who still show signs of enthusiasm in the Common
Lisp community, who still express love for their language, who still
want the language to be fully implemented. [...] In any _other_
community, those who love the language would be celebrated and the
nay-sayers would be run out of town, asked to go create their own
community. Instead, we let these corpses stay with us and spread death
and gloom and pestilence, [...] We need to throw out and bury the
corpses. [...]"
JB
Obviously, Microsoft cannot afford to offer much support as
they sell many copies of their usually cheap products. They
would probably give you good support if you paid for this
kind of support. I am sure that they offer this kind of
support.
I have had the experience that I got very good support from
commercial Lisp vendors like Franz of even Corman and got
the same kind of support from Trolltech (Qt), though I was
not their customer and from what I had posted here they
could infer that it was not very likely that I should
become one.
Probably, if I were their customer, their support were even
better (though what I got was completely satisfactory
anyway).
I looked at several Lisp compilers in the past and I think
that if you are serious about Lisp, you should buy a
commercial license. And if you want to work on Linux /and/
on Windows then you cannot buy Corman Lisp. In this case,
you should buy LispWorks or ACL from Franz (which I should
prefer).
I do not think that it will be easy to find a free compiler
that meets your demands.
--
JB
Daniel Barlow
> Peter Seibel <pe...@javamonkey.com> writes:
>
>> You think? Cool--I'll "contribute" my patch that "fixes" all those
>> annoying (to me) coding idioms in implementation X. Do you think the
>> maintainers of X will consider *that* patch desirable? ;-)
>
> For all values of X where X = SBCL, you have a good shot ;)
I think that Peter was talking in more general terms than the original
specific suggestion of a tree shaker, and I wouldn't want
comp.lang.lisp to think that SBCL will merge any and every patch that
comes along just because someone believes it will fix their
annoyances. Because we won't :-)
(Speaking from personal experience, I've been unable to convince
people that TRUENAME would be better off to _not_ follow symlinks, or
that LOAD-1-FOREIGN should be renamed)
But, specifically, if he (or anyone else reading) does want to
introduce a tree shaker, that would be very interesting. I'd probably
suggest to anyone wanting to tackle it that they start by looking at
the new XREF functionality that Eric Marsden has introduced in CMUCL
and seeing how that translates.
(with-plug
SBCL 0.7.11 will be released on or around New Year's Eve,
all being well. Changes are mostly bugfixes, but it also now builds on
FreeBSD 5.0 - and apparently, is or will soon be in the freebsd
"ports" system.
Depending on how much time I have available, native threading
(initially on Linux x86) will probably start landing in January or
February, but that estimate's made wearing a developer hat, not a
project manager hat.)
-dan
--
http://www.cliki.net/ - Link farm for free CL-on-Unix resources
Kenny Tilton
Oleg wrote:
> wni wrote:
>
> [ snipped ]
>
> You may find it amusing that a search for
> "idiot OR moron OR cretin" in comp.lang.lisp limited to year 2002 returns
> 102 results. OTOH, a similar search in comp.lang.fortran produces only 9
> results; fa.caml - 1; comp.lang.c - 163
Sloppy research! Most of that was me describing my own coding, and I do
not post on those NGs.
Joe Marshall
> I suspect that the number of people who think C is a very flawed language
> dwarfs the number of people who think that about Lisp. The difference is
> that the C coders simply don't feel threatened by people who don't like C.
I don't think any Lisp aficionado feels threatened by *anyone* who
doesn't like lisp. I think `annoyed' is the word.
Matt Curtin
> I suspect that the number of people who think C is a very flawed
> language dwarfs the number of people who think that about Lisp. The
> difference is that the C coders simply don't feel threatened by
> people who don't like C.
I think the real issue here is a bit more general. How politicized
the language is will affect how much noise there is, largely as a
function of advocacy (for and against) the language in question.
Java newsgroups also have quite a lot of noise, including people from
Microsoft posting under Hotmail pseudonyms about how flawed it is, why
C# is so much better, blah blah blah blah... only to be exposed, and
to disappear ... often emerging with a new pseudonym as one of the
next new idiots to appear a few weeks later.
Even beyond programming languages, the same rule generally holds true,
e.g., Linux.
Creation of *.advocacy newsgroups can sometimes help to direct the
tripe, but certainly not all. And the advocacy groups easily turn
into little more than threads of flamefests.
I cannot help but wonder how many personae that would no doubt exist
on a comp.lang.lisp.advocacy would actually be Lisp programs. I also
cannot help but wonder (with some amusement at the very idea) how many
anti-Lisp zealots would lose their arguments to such programs.
--
Matt Curtin, CISSP, IAM, INTP. Keywords: Lisp, Unix, Internet, INFOSEC.
Founder, Interhack Corporation +1 614 545 HACK http://web.interhack.com/
Author of /Developing Trust: Online Privacy and Security/ (Apress, 2001)
Tim Bradshaw
> How do you know whether people are interested in learning the truth when
> they "turn up"?
You don't. But when you tell them , but when you explain things, and
they don't listen but repeat back the same stuff they said before, you
begin to realise something.
> I suspect that the number of people who think C is a very flawed language
> dwarfs the number of people who think that about Lisp. The difference is
> that the C coders simply don't feel threatened by people who don't like C.
As a proportion of users of the languages, I wonder if that is so.
However I don't feel threatened by people who don't like Lisp. I do
feel annoyed by people who refuse to listen when things are explained
to them.
--tim
Kenny Tilton
Chris Gehlker wrote:
> On 12/30/02 7:16 AM, in article ey3of73...@cley.com, "Tim Bradshaw"
> <t...@cley.com> wrote:
> How do you know whether people are interested in learning the truth when
> they "turn up"?
They make that manifest in their responses to the helpful responses they
get to their OPs. One thing that strikes me abou cl.l. is how wrong are
those who call this NG unfriendly. Newcomers are always given the
benefit of the doubt, and then one by one the regulars come up to speed
onthe cluelessness we are dealing with. Some regulars get there /real
fast/ <g>, but to their credit they almost always turn out to have been
right in their quick assessments.
I am pretty sure about this, because I have been informally studying
these close encounters of an nth kind since someone I know to be highly
cool observed that cll was a hostile place.
>
> The difference is
> that the C coders simply don't feel threatened by people who don't like C.
Right. To a large degree I have a thin skin re Lisp because the drumbeat
of nonsense is so unrelenting, the ignorance so pervasive. In a few
years when OReilly is accepting /only/ Lisp books for publication we
won't even respond to naysayers.
:)
Chris Gehlker
<j...@ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
But fear/anger or concern/annoyance if you prefer milder terms, are at root
the same emotion. At least the physiologists & social psychologists think
so.
This is all speculation anyway. I did do one experiment to test it though. I
searched a couple of Visual Basic groups for any signs that the posters were
as angry as the typical poster here. They clearly are not.
Kenny Tilton
Pascal Costanza wrote:
> P.S.: I wonder what Common Lisp vendors think about this situation.
That would be interesting. I wager "there is no such thing as bad
publicity" is close. :)
> After all, anyone that shows some interest in Common Lisp is a potential
> customer in the long run, unless scared away prematurely. Or am I
> overestimating the impact of newsgroups?
Two things: One, no, I do not think anyone ever got interested in any
language and then punted because of its NG.
Second, do what I have been doing. Watch objectively what happens when
someone asks for support here (if I can put it that way). They get
incredible support. Free. Within hours.
Sounds damn atractive to me.
Kenny Tilton
Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> Tim Bradshaw <t...@cley.com> writes:
>
>
>>(2) Some regular posters say you are an idiot when they think you
>>are. So what's wrong with that?
>
>
> The ensuing "discussions" are tedious in the extreme.
>
I feel exactly the same way and often start to tell the correspondents
to pipe down, but then I always remember that I am reading through all
the garbage voluntarily for its amusement value. Doh!
Nils Kassube
>> (2) Some regular posters say you are an idiot when they think you
>> are. So what's wrong with that?
> The ensuing "discussions" are tedious in the extreme.
You should get a real news reader software with support for scoring
and the ability to ignore threads you don't want to read.
SCNR ;-)
Chris Gehlker
<t...@cley.com> wrote:
> * Chris Gehlker wrote:
>
>> How do you know whether people are interested in learning the truth when
>> they "turn up"?
>
> You don't. But when you tell them , but when you explain things, and
> they don't listen but repeat back the same stuff they said before, you
> begin to realise something.
Clearly. I think I read something into "turn up" that you didn't intend.
>
>> I suspect that the number of people who think C is a very flawed language
>> dwarfs the number of people who think that about Lisp. The difference is
>> that the C coders simply don't feel threatened by people who don't like C.
>
> As a proportion of users of the languages, I wonder if that is so.
I don't have any hard evidence but I suspect it's so. I haven't met an
enthusiastic C user in years, and I know lots of C users. I do know many who
are enthusiastic about what they are doing in C, but that's not the same
thing.
Tim Bradshaw
> The ensuing "discussions" are tedious in the extreme.
Yes, I agree, but whose fault is that? The person calling someone an
idiot, the person so called, all the other people who get offended by
one side or the other and then wade in, or, finally, all the people
who carry on reading the thread. I think it's mostly the latter two
groups.
--tim
Chris Gehlker
<kti...@nyc.rr.com> wrote:
> Right. To a large degree I have a thin skin re Lisp because the drumbeat
> of nonsense is so unrelenting, the ignorance so pervasive. In a few
> years when OReilly is accepting /only/ Lisp books for publication we
> won't even respond to naysayers.
>
I just can't find the naysayers. I don't know any personally and a Google
for "lisp sucks" turned up "Well, in this disciples point of view, Lisp has
a very high impedance mismatch with the human brain. This makes it very hard
to grok at first. But, that's about all that makes Lisp suck. So go read
Lisp Rocks again!" as the *most* negative comment in the first page of hits.
The O'Reilly thing is disturbing but I suspect that a lot of the motivation
there was commercial. There are high quality, free PDFs of Lisp books
floating around. O'Reilly notoriously cancelled Ruby books and lost their
enthusiasm for Ruby when the "PickAxe Book" showed up on the web.
Tim Bradshaw
> http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3208226254834485%40naggum.net&output=gplain
> Here is an excerpt:
> "There are some people who still show signs of enthusiasm in the
> Common Lisp community, who still express love for their language, who
> still want the language to be fully implemented. [...] In any _other_
> community, those who love the language would be celebrated and the
> nay-sayers would be run out of town, asked to go create their own
> community. Instead, we let these corpses stay with us and spread
> death and gloom and pestilence, [...] We need to throw out and bury
> the corpses. [...]"
This excerpt (I haven't checked the original article) does not seem,
to me, to have anything to do with your statement:
Some of them try to defend Common Lisp by all means, and at least
one of them has even stated this as an explicit goal.
Rather it seems to me to be encouraging people who don't like Lisp to,
well, do something else, rather than hanging around denigrating the
language in a forum dedicated to it. How is this `defending [Common]
Lisp by all means'? I find that a very strange reading of this
excerpt.
--tim
Gabe Garza
> This is all speculation anyway. I did do one experiment to test it though. I
> searched a couple of Visual Basic groups for any signs that the posters were
> as angry as the typical poster here. They clearly are not.
If Common Lisp was as widely accepted as Visual Basic, maybe the
posters here would be holding hands and dancing under the rainbow
too. :)
I think that a lot of the "anger" isn't so much because some people
dismiss and misunderstand Lisp, but because the majority of the
industry (and even a lot of academic realms) dismiss it--if not
explicitly then at least implicitly with indifference. Someone coming
here and refusing to either listen or bite their tongue is just adding
insult to injury. I think Lisp's lack of popularity is a major sore
point--and strangers walking up and poking at sores isn't welcome.
What makes Lisp's lack of popularity even more painful is that it is
symptomatic of major flaws with the computer world as a whole...
This is (of course!) based on my own opinion. I don't mean to speak
for anyone else...
Gabe Garza
Erik Naggum
| Here is an excerpt:
Sigh. As usual, the distance between the text you quote and the
conclusion you want to support is measured in astronomical units.
Could you, for /once/, try to back up some of your conclusions with a
relevant set of /connections/ between the facts and your conclusion?
It is by now evident beyond doubt that you believe you see things
that are simply not there, probably because you are /unaware/ of
your very own "contribution" to the process. This is usually called
psychosis, but if you could at least /try/ to explain how you got
from observation to conclusion, there is a nonzero probability that
you can be shown that you have only seen your own assumptions and
preconceptions and have discarded all the evidence to the contrary.
As long as you only look for confirmation of your preconceptions and
are as happy as an astrologist or any other mystic when a prediction
comes true despite thousands of predictions that did not, there is
no way to provide you with counter-information, because only the
information that supports something you already believe is important
to you. Just as you look away when you do not feel sufficiently
warm and fuzzy and positive (or whatever), you evidently also look
away when something could prove you wrong, because this, too, would
make you feel less than stellar. To most sane people, the very idea
of turning a blind eye to everything that feels bad is tantamount to
discarding one's sanity, but as you have confirmed previously, you
do indeed check your feelings first. The only possible result of
this willful denial of the external world is that you defend ever
more misguided notions and keep inventing things to support them.
To put it very mildly, this bugs the hell out of me, but I would not
bother to respond unless you had this uncontrollable urge to keep
posting negative bullshit about me.
You have not actually listened to anything I have written, but only
"confirm" your mental image of me and behave as if I /am/ the image
in /your/ mind. You obviously do not think this is wrong, or you
would have got a grip on yourself and repaired yourself, but the
more you keep this fantastically annoying game going where the whole
purpose of your increasingly /untrue/ claims about other people is
to pretend that what you want to believe is true. Normal human
*decency* prevents most people from continuing to spout lies and so
much hostile crap about somebody else when they have been arrested
for their inability to accept corrections, but you seem to have made
it your purpose here to keep pretending two things: (1) that you are
a perfect, flawless saint without whom comp.lang.lisp will die a
most horrible death, and (2) that I am some devil that you have to
fight. Since you are emotion-driven to the point of neurosis, you
will not even understand what is wrong with your behavior, but you
/have/ to notice the negative emotions you feel when I ask you to
please stop lying so much. You are not /actually/ braindead, are
you? There is still /something/ in you that accepts input from the
external world that makes you feel bad and then shut down. Or have
you shut down so completely that you are now entirely of prejudice
and feel bad even before you have read what I write to you? I have
my deepest doubts about your ability to read /anything/ that does
not keep you emotionally on top of the world, but your unceasing
need to keep talking about me is /pathological/.
You /always/ have to "share" your lies about me with this forum when
you feel sufficiently morally outraged to abandon your rationality.
Why do you have to keep lying? What on /earth/ compels you to keep
making these idiotic "contributions" here? You /must/ understand,
even with your emotional needs, that when you keep lying and making
all your hateful claims about me, you make things /worse/? You are
not /actually/ completely braindead, are you?
You do not have to keep adding fuel to the flames whenever some of
your kind rises to make his moronic and most uncivil "objections"
because his puny brainpower does not grasp what is going on and he
feels excluded. You evidently strongly support such people and have
made it your purpose here to make such people attack me, but that
you have failed to understand how thoroughly /antisocial/ you are
and that people tire of this forum because of scumbags like you and
those you support, is impossible. /Something/ in you must be able
to see the damage you do. Yet you keep doing it. The alternative
is that you are so morally outraged that whatever intelligence you
might possess is rendered inoperative while you go on your holy
mission, that your intelligence is a fair-weather intelligence that
can only help you when the external world rubs you the right way.
Part of being a /social/ animal, Pascal Costanza, is being able to
deal with other people without having to /express/ your primitive
emotions of tribal inclusion or exclusion. I /know/ that you do not
want me in this forum. I /know/ that you are such a staggeringly
stupid person as to be a functional illiterate when it comes to deal
with counter-information to your beliefs. I /know/ that you have so
many negative emotions that your need to share them stems from self-
preservation: You would /explode/ if you could not vent your spleen.
And therefore, because you are such a hideous character, you believe
that other people are like you, and then you do the stupidest thing
that inferior people can do: They attack other people by proxy, by
projecting their own evil onto them, by demonizing them and seeing
monsters, and most importantly, by terminating their /dialog/ with
the person they /hate/. You are so clearly malfunctioning when it
comes to dealing with such simple things as not making things worse
by rearing your ugly head, that you cannot be expected to understand
how destructive you are, but there are people who express a deep-
rooted exasperation about /you/ and /your/ need to keep supporting
every flaming moron in this newsgroup. You drive people away from
this forum, Pascal Costanza, by never letting go. Like maniacal
lunatic, you just /have/ to keep posting your insane hatred towards
me and you /cannot/ stop. I fear that you actually feel that you
have to speek up lest you "support" me by your silence, but I urge
you as strongly as I can, to give it a rest, let it go, get over it,
move on, and accept that you do not /have/ to involve yourself each
and every goddamn time someone says something negative about me. We
/all/ know how you feel. It is /impossible/ not to know how much
you hate me and how much you need to blame me for everything that
you cannot deal with, so you do not have to keep repeating it. As
for me, I could not care less what you feel if you only shut up.
Seeking validation of your personal feelings are /not/ the purpose
of comp.lang.lisp, Pascal Costanza. Please be so /decent/ as to
keep most of them to yourself when they are as hateful and negative
as they are. They have no place here. /Try/ to manage to think
even though you feel a strong desire not to. This newsgroup is
/not/ about how Pascal Costanza feels about Erik Naggum. It is
about the programming language (family|Common) Lisp. Can you please
try to grasp this and stop telling your obnoxious lies about me?
And do /not/ send another emotional message to this forum. /You/
opened this issue by blaming me, again, and /you/ can accept that
you have been castigated for this idiocy and simply cease and
desist. That I think you are among the worst shitheads this planet
has spawned should be pretty clear, but you do /not/ improve the
matter by "defending" yourself. To defend a mistake is to make
another mistake. Just accept that you made a mistake and resolve
/not to do it again/.
So, can we have 2003 without any more of your off-topic attacks on
me and without any more of your off-topic support of every loser who
feels bad and brandishes his emotional dysfunction for all to see?
Send the goddamn loser /mail/ if you have to take on the burden that
others cannot bear, but figure it out: /You/ destroy this forum when
/you/ abuse it to stage your moronic wars against someone because
/you/ think they are to blame. /You/ are to blame for the damage
that /you/ do. Accept responsibility for yourself and be /nice/ if
that is how you think others should behave. Can you do all this?
If no, respond with an emotional self-defense, but if yes, you will
simply behave well and not talk about it. Let your /actions/ speak
for you in 2003. Manage to establish positive feelings where you
feel none yourself, and you will have proven your claims. If you
keep causing negative emotions like you have in the past when you
lambast others for not considering other people emotions, you will
admit that your theory is not only false, but destructive. Do you
believe that your theories actually work? /Prove/ it in 2003!
Erik Naggum
| This is all speculation anyway. I did do one experiment to test it
| though. I searched a couple of Visual Basic groups for any signs
| that the posters were as angry as the typical poster here. They
| clearly are not.
Did that include the newbies who rush in to make bold claims that
the standard is broken and they have to tell everyone what it says
because before they came along, all Common Lisp programmers and
language lawyers were living in the dark?
I have never seen the kind of pestering idiots we suffer here in
comp.lang.lisp regularly anywhere else on this planet. When I
spent a lot more time trying to explain SGML to people, we had
people who came rushing in to proclaim that so and so was broken
and badly designed, but they actually /listened/ when they were
told how and why it became that way and how it worked and how they
could get what they wanted. Peculiar to the comp.lang.lisp newbie
is that he does not listen and does not stop talking. And every
one of them have evidently read previous posts where they find fuel
for their massive confusion as well as reason to resist correction.
Fighting off the lunatic fringe that invades comp.lang.lisp is like
debunking physics lunatics like Santilli and his "magnecules" or
discussing medicine in the presence of "alternative" medicinemen.
The core problem is that some people will insist that whatever they
heard first must be truer than anything they hear later, and they
are just as obnoxious if they first hear some bogosity as if they
think they grok Common Lisp from tinkering with Emacs Lisp.
Tim Bradshaw
> But fear/anger or concern/annoyance if you prefer milder terms, are at root
> the same emotion. At least the physiologists & social psychologists think
> so.
Erm. Then they should get some new brains, because theirs obviously
aren't working very well. When I'm angry at my cat does that mean I'm
afraid of her? When I'm annoyed by some fool on cll does that mean
I'm afraid of them? Come on, *think*! Don't listen to what some fool
social `scientist' says, think what these states actually *feel* like.
--tim
Joe Marshall
> But fear/anger or concern/annoyance if you prefer milder terms, are at root
> the same emotion. At least the physiologists & social psychologists think
> so.
Hmmm. I'm annoyed at email spam. I get angry at the people who send
it. I don't think I fear it.
I fear that my kids may be injured in a car accident caused by a drunk
driver. It would be more than an annoyance if such were to happen.
Perhaps at some `root level' the emotions are the `the same', but
I'd be annoyed at anyone that says the emotions are indistinguishable
beyond that. And I don't fear physiologists and social psychologists
who may contradict me.
Erann Gat
The call to action in the last sentence is first-person: "We need to..."
Reading "we" to mean "people who don't like Lisp" seems untenable to me.
Furthermore, the action called for is to "throw out and bury the
corposes." I don't see any plausible way to read this as meaning "go away
and do something else."
So I find your reading of this excerpt to be "encouraging people who don't
like Lisp to, well, do something else" to be very strange indeed.
E.
Chris Gehlker
<t...@cley.com> wrote:
I think they do actually feel very similar. When I get angry at my wife's
cat (my cat is perfect, I never get angry at him) it's because I see her
starting to squat outside the litter box or I find evidence that she missed
it. In either case, I *fear* that I am about to have an unpleasant
experience. Fear is a very strong word but it seems to me that it differs in
degree from such emotions as concern or worry, not in essence. Similarly
anger is a very strong word but it seems to me that annoyance isn't an
entirely different emotion, just a weaker form.
Obviously, when you get annoyed at somebody on the list you are in literal
fear of them as an individual. But isn't it possible that part of your
annoyance comes from the concern that the views they are expressing are
widely held?
Donald Fisk
> The last person who could be thought of as being hounded out of cll
> who I can think of was Ilias, although he kind of hounded himself out
> - I think by the end that basically no one would talk to him and he
> got bored and wandered off. Can anyone - *anyone* - give examples of
> someone who really had a lot (or anything) to contribute who was
> hounded out?
Well, the very first person to post here (First message of new
newsgroup, 1982-03-27) felt unwelcome last year (I'm outta here,
2001-11-15) on and has not returned.
But I think he's a rare exception. Most of the people rejected
by the newsgroup's immune system probably deserved it.
> --tim
Le Hibou
--
Dalinian: Lisp. Java. Which one sounds sexier?
RevAaron: Definitely Lisp. Lisp conjures up images of hippy coders,
drugs, sex, and rock & roll. Late nights at Berkeley, coding in
Lisp fueled by LSD. Java evokes a vision of a stereotypical nerd,
with no life or social skills.
Tim Bradshaw
> I don't have any hard evidence but I suspect it's so. I haven't met an
> enthusiastic C user in years, and I know lots of C users. I do know many who
> are enthusiastic about what they are doing in C, but that's not the same
> thing.
You've met one now. I think C is cool: almost as cool as CL. It's a
*completely* different approach suitable to very different problems,
and it has some annoying misfeatures (like CL), but it's just a great
language. (Note: I said C, not C++, which I do not think is cool.) I
think Java is cool too, though not in the same way, more as a
beautifully engineered solution to a number of technical and `social'
problems. I even think Perl is cool, in a mutant sort of way. So now
you can shoot me.
--tim
Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
> I even think Perl is cool, in a mutant sort of way.
So, what's your opinion on Tcl? :-)
--
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
la...@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
Tim Bradshaw
> I think they do actually feel very similar.
Oh well, maybe for some people (perhaps people who live in some
permanent terror). Not for me: I can be angry, afraid, or both, in
any degree.
> Obviously, when you get annoyed at somebody on the list you are in literal
> fear of them as an individual. But isn't it possible that part of your
> annoyance comes from the concern that the views they are expressing are
> widely held?
I presume s/are/aren't/ above. But no, when I get angry it's usually
because they are wasting my time (yes, this is selfish, but I find it
hard to get angry because someone else is wasting their time...). I
don't, really, care whether bogus views are widely held: I *know* they
are, about all sorts of stuff, so I have no room for fear about
that...
I guess this is going nowhere - obviously psychowotsits can make all
sorts of random claims and be believed, but for me, I don't beleive
fear and anger have much in common. I've been *very* frightened
indeed and *very* angry and they were really remarkably different
experiences.
--tim
Tim Bradshaw
> The call to action in the last sentence is first-person: "We need to..."
> Reading "we" to mean "people who don't like Lisp" seems untenable to me.
> Furthermore, the action called for is to "throw out and bury the
> corposes." I don't see any plausible way to read this as meaning "go away
> and do something else."
Oh, I see it as meaning `we (people who use Lisp and want to discuss
it in a useful way) need to make people who only want to be derogatory
about it to not post in cll, so we can get some useful discussion done
rather than endlessly dealing with them'. Or in other words it's
saying that we (same we) should encourage, strongly, these people who
don't like Lisp (and have nothing constructive to say) to, well, go
away and do something else (but post in cll).
--tim
Kaz Kylheku
> On 12/30/02 12:01 PM, in article bs33l4...@ccs.neu.edu, "Joe Marshall"
> <j...@ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
> > Chris Gehlker <geh...@fastq.com> writes:
> >
> >> I suspect that the number of people who think C is a very flawed language
> >> dwarfs the number of people who think that about Lisp. The difference is
> >> that the C coders simply don't feel threatened by people who don't like C.
> >
> > I don't think any Lisp aficionado feels threatened by *anyone* who
> > doesn't like lisp. I think `annoyed' is the word.
>
> But fear/anger or concern/annoyance if you prefer milder terms, are at root
> the same emotion. At least the physiologists & social psychologists think
> so.
>
> This is all speculation anyway. I did do one experiment to test it though. I
> searched a couple of Visual Basic groups for any signs that the posters were
> as angry as the typical poster here. They clearly are not.
VB-pushing idiots have nothing to be arrogant about, and are too
stupid to realize when someone proposes some wrong way of doing
something. Everything seems like a neat idea when all you know is VB;
the whole world resembles a child's crayon drawing hanging on a
refridgerator, depicting sunshine, stick figures holding hands, bees
landing on flowers and the like.
Speaking of C, the comp.lang.c newsgroup is one of the most hostile
ones. It's probably worse than comp.lang.lisp. It is indeed is quite
harsh toward ill-considered criticisms of the C language. It's a lot
less tolerant of implementation-specific discussions than
comp.lang.lisp. Here you can ask something that pertains only to, say,
LispWorks, Corman Lisp or CLISP without being told off. The harshness
is an explicit culture in comp.lang.c; it's meta-discussed from time
to time and generally accepted as a virtue. The basic tenet is to be
kind to genuine newbies with topical questions, and merciless toward
dumb answers. Correctness is very important; it's hard to get away
with any nonportable coding example, or assertion that is not backed
by the ISO standard.
I think that psychonanalyzing people in Usenet forums is futile. What
appears as anger or annoyance is often just a deliberate writing
voice. When you know you are right, it's extremely entertaining to don
an air of complete arrogance, and watch the little psycho-analyzing
idiots fall for it and get their feathers all ruffled.
If you want to psychoanalyze, start with this principle: people do
voluntarily that which gives them some kind of pleasure (whether it is
healthy or destructive is a different matter---contrast listening to
Beethoven with injecting heroin).
Patrick W
> I just can't find the naysayers. I don't know any personally and a
> Google for "lisp sucks" turned up "Well, in this disciples point of
> view, Lisp has a very high impedance mismatch with the human
> brain. This makes it very hard to grok at first. But, that's about
> all that makes Lisp suck. So go read Lisp Rocks again!" as the
> *most* negative comment in the first page of hits.
There are a few naysayers in other newsgroups. But are they naysayers
because they believe Lisp sucks? I doubt it.
People make a small number of reasoned decisions amidst much
uncertainty, and do the best they can. It is a terrible waste of time
to regularly revise past decisions, backtrack, change course, move
forward, change mind, backtrack, change course, move on, etc. People
make a few vital decisions early in an endeavour, and defend them
vigorously. But not necessarily honestly.
Publicly justifying or privately rationalising a choice often involves
turning a deliberately blind or jaundiced eye to alternatives. It's
one of the prices we pay for the capacity to focus and persevere. (If
anyone out there is both (a) immune to all forms of wilful blindness;
(b) productive; I'd like to know how you do it).
It amazes me that so many people assume that the main purpose of
communicating is to share and to learn. In many *many* different
contexts (some of them really scary), much communication depends on a
shared intention *not* to see, but to create increasingly robust
rationalisations for what is already 'known', or has already been
decided, or for what 'must' be the case even if it isn't, or what must
*not* be the case, even if it is.
This is pervasive, and can often be very subtle. But spotting it in
usenet discussions is ridiculously easy. Discussions involving
language comparisons are usually only fake preludes to conclusions
already reached, or rationalisations for decisions already made. When
somebody mentions Lisp on Slashdot or comp.lang.flavour-of-the-month,
it becomes very obvious that some people would *rather* find evidence
that Lisp sucks than ... (well, you can guess the rest).
Even if we limit this to narrow technical issues, Lisp is far from
alone. For each of the many justifiable criticisms of C++, there are
at least a dozen stupid ones that are bandied about by people who know
nothing, and don't *need* to know, because their only purpose is to
prop up a decision they made some time ago to not learn it, or to use
something else instead. (Right decision, wrong reasons) ;-)
If Lisp people are more sensitive to illogical criticisms, it's partly
because they have better technical reasons to be frustrated, and
partly because they share at least one blind eye with the rest of the
population.
Coby Beck
"Kaz Kylheku" <k...@ashi.footprints.net> wrote in message
news:cf333042.02123...@posting.google.com...
> voice. When you know you are right, it's extremely entertaining to don
> an air of complete arrogance, and watch the little psycho-analyzing
> idiots fall for it and get their feathers all ruffled.
Well, that pretty much defines "troll" and has little utility wether your
goal is to teach or to learn.
--
Coby Beck
(remove #\Space "coby 101 @ bigpond . com")
Coby Beck
"Tim Bradshaw" <t...@cley.com> wrote in message
news:ey3of73...@cley.com...
> The last person who could be thought of as being hounded out of cll
> who I can think of was Ilias, although he kind of hounded himself out
> - I think by the end that basically no one would talk to him and he
> got bored and wandered off. Can anyone - *anyone* - give examples of
> someone who really had a lot (or anything) to contribute who was
> hounded out?
Well, for various definitions of "contribute" and "hound out" I always
thought that way about Erann Gat's long absence.
>
> I think that there are two relevant features of cll which make it
> somewhat ruder than (some - by no means all) other groups. (1) There
> are a relatively large number of people who turn up with extremely
> wrong and very negative views, and who are not interested in learning
> the truth.
I really do agree with this. Ignorance when given the confidence that comes
with popular consensus is a formidable force. Logic and reason often have
little effect.
> (2) Some regular
> posters say you are an idiot when they think you are. So what's wrong
> with that?
I think we've been over all sides of that one before. If you are asking the
question then I am sure any answer I can come up with would not sway you. I
don't think that agreeing to disagree is the wrong thing to do about that.
It's interesting to note that lately the number of "leave me alone, you
feel-good jerks" posts seem (to me at least) to greatly outweigh the "take a
pill, you foul-mouth heathens" posts. Is it true? and What could it mean?
stay tuned..... ;)
Marc Spitzer
> "Kaz Kylheku" <k...@ashi.footprints.net> wrote in message
> news:cf333042.02123...@posting.google.com...
> > voice. When you know you are right, it's extremely entertaining to don
> > an air of complete arrogance, and watch the little psycho-analyzing
> > idiots fall for it and get their feathers all ruffled.
>
> Well, that pretty much defines "troll" and has little utility wether your
> goal is to teach or to learn.
As far as I know part of the definition of troll is that they provide
nothing of value. A correct answer is something of value, even if you
are behaving as a complete asshole when providing it. Ergo not a troll
marc
Frank A. Adrian
> So when someone says `I need a standalone executable' what they are
> saying is `it is essential to me that I don't see the software
> components when I use the ls command. Make me use some sort of ELF or
> COFF image dumper instead.' This is a ludicrous requirement.
In most cases, it IS a ludicrous requirement (and one not necessarily needed
for most products). But there are a few reasons why this requirement might
be useful:
* A single file simplifies the installation and uninstallation of the
program, as well as making it less easy for a naive user to screw up the
system once installed (people will delete the oddest things).
* It's easier to download a single file than a bunch of them when
desconstructing archival files is not possible.
* I really don't want to use Lisp and am trying to find a reason why it
won't work for me.
I believe that the last reason is the main reason that causes the
requirement to be added.
faa
Gareth McCaughan
> I don't have any hard evidence but I suspect it's so. I haven't met an
> enthusiastic C user in years, and I know lots of C users. I do know many who
> are enthusiastic about what they are doing in C, but that's not the same
> thing.
I see someone else already owned up, so I will too. I'm
(moderately) enthusiastic about C. I think it's a nice
piece of design; it does what it does really rather well.
I even quite like C++, though it suffers badly from trying
(as it were) to compete with both C and CL.
I suspect that considerably more CL programmers than, say,
C programmers like a wide variety of other languages.
This may just be because by the time someone discovers CL
they've usually had time to find several other decent
languages first, but I don't think that's the whole story.
--
Gareth McCaughan Gareth.M...@pobox.com
.sig under construc
Kenny Tilton
Patrick W wrote:
> It is a terrible waste of time
> to regularly revise past decisions, backtrack, change course, move
> forward, change mind, backtrack, change course, move on, etc.
Good lord! That's how I program!! So that's why it takes me so long.
> Publicly justifying or privately rationalising a choice often involves
> turning a deliberately blind or jaundiced eye to alternatives.
I thought you were going to say "involves lying like a rug", because
none of us gets the introspection thing right. When someone asks me
"why?", I warn them "I'll tell you, but I'll be making it up as I go along."
> It's
> one of the prices we pay for the capacity to focus and persevere. (If
> anyone out there is both (a) immune to all forms of wilful blindness;
> (b) productive; I'd like to know how you do it).
Yeah, but strike willful. To me it is like reading. We can do it quickly
only if we go by partial information visually in re identifying words
and on the other hand add information in the form of our expectations of
what we are about to read based on context and all the knowledge and
experience we bring to the reading act. No one /intends/ that, it's just
how it goes.
>
> It amazes me that so many people assume that the main purpose of
> communicating is to share and to learn.
fat chance! It is said that whenever two sailboats are in sight of each
other there is a race going on. We need a line like that for Usenet.
But in this case... good post!
:)
Kenny Tilton
Chris Gehlker wrote:
> On 12/30/02 12:01 PM, in article bs33l4...@ccs.neu.edu, "Joe Marshall"
> <j...@ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
>
>>Chris Gehlker <geh...@fastq.com> writes:
>>
>>
>>>I suspect that the number of people who think C is a very flawed language
>>>dwarfs the number of people who think that about Lisp. The difference is
>>>that the C coders simply don't feel threatened by people who don't like C.
>>
>>I don't think any Lisp aficionado feels threatened by *anyone* who
>>doesn't like lisp. I think `annoyed' is the word.
>
>
> But fear/anger or concern/annoyance if you prefer milder terms, are at root
> the same emotion. At least the physiologists & social psychologists think
> so.
Says you <g>:
from http://www.brain.riken.go.jp/bsinews/bsinews3/no3/speciale.html
"It has also been made clear that the regions related to fear and anger
are clearly segregated each other within the amygdala. The same is the
case in the hypothalamus and in the midbrain central gray."
and http://www.apa.org/science/ed-freyd.html
"Research in psychology provides some insight into the relationship
between fear, anger, and hatred. Most animals naturally respond to
threat with either flight or fight. When flight is not an option we are
likely, at a very basic psychological and physiological level, to feel
the need to fight. Anger and hatred of the enemy is one way our minds
might try to help our bodies prepare for a frightening survival situation."
ie, they ain't the same but fear can lead to anger, which is a horse of
a different color.
Actually I do recall a science times article about german shepherds in
which it was said researchers concluded they were feeling the same
emotion when barking ferociously as when afraid, but that was many years
ago and may have been superseded.
I too looked askance at "threatened", but I figured I knew what you
meant and did not want to get into hairsplitting. And to a degree there
is a threat implicit in the drumbeat of misinformation. Repeat a lie
often enough, etc.
Chris Gehlker
<g_g...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> Chris Gehlker <geh...@fastq.com> writes:
>
>> This is all speculation anyway. I did do one experiment to test it though. I
>> searched a couple of Visual Basic groups for any signs that the posters were
>> as angry as the typical poster here. They clearly are not.
>
> If Common Lisp was as widely accepted as Visual Basic, maybe the
> posters here would be holding hands and dancing under the rainbow
> too. :)
It's weird though. I don't think that very many people think VB is an
especially good language. Around here it's what gets taught, along with Java
and C#, at the trade schools and junior colleges. Lisp is still the language
at the university. I see below that you think that changing in some academic
areas. When MS first announced .Net there was a perception among the VB
programmers that they were abandoning VB altogether. Then there was real
fear and anger.
> I think that a lot of the "anger" isn't so much because some people
> dismiss and misunderstand Lisp, but because the majority of the
> industry (and even a lot of academic realms) dismiss it--if not
> explicitly then at least implicitly with indifference.
This seems pretty insightful. A lot of people seem to think that Lisp is a
great language but it's not the right language for what they are trying to
do. They *may* be right in some cases. My whole experience with VB was
adding some additional functions to an Excel spreadsheet. It was easier to
figure out how to do that in VB from scratch than to figure out how to do
that in a real language. As I recall, I was paging through the manual
looking for a way to extend the spreadsheet language and discovered 2 things
in about 10 minutes.
1) If I wanted to use anything but VB I had to send MS serious $ for a
developers kit.
2) There was an example close enough to what I was trying to do that I could
copy and edit it w/o really understanding it.
I don't know where I'm going with this except to suggest half way seriously
that a lot of the "programming" done is VB is pretty repetitive stuff and
that maybe we should all study it with a view to writing a VB programmer in
Lisp.
Chris Gehlker
<t...@cley.com> wrote:
>
> I guess this is going nowhere - obviously psychowotsits can make all
> sorts of random claims and be believed, but for me, I don't beleive
> fear and anger have much in common. I've been *very* frightened
> indeed and *very* angry and they were really remarkably different
> experiences.
OK. You are obviously the best expert on your own feelings.
Chris Gehlker
cf333042.02123...@posting.google.com, "Kaz Kylheku"
<k...@ashi.footprints.net> wrote:
> VB-pushing idiots have nothing to be arrogant about, and are too
> stupid to realize when someone proposes some wrong way of doing
> something. Everything seems like a neat idea when all you know is VB;
> the whole world resembles a child's crayon drawing hanging on a
> refridgerator, depicting sunshine, stick figures holding hands, bees
> landing on flowers and the like.
>
> Speaking of C, the comp.lang.c newsgroup is one of the most hostile
> ones. It's probably worse than comp.lang.lisp.
I simply can't find anything posted on comp.lang.c over the last three days
that sounds remotely as angry as your paragraph that I quoted above.
The VB programmer that I know personally is neither arrogant, stupid nor an
idiot. She is very aware that if she lost her job as a VB programmer, she
would lose her visa and, considering her nationality, most of her life
expectancy.
I suppose if she went on about the virtues of VB compared to other languages
I would become mildly annoyed but she doesn't do that. But she seems to
accept it for what it is, an entry level language for people to use while
they study something more expressive.
In fact, the only people who advocate for VB seem to be paid salespeople.
There is Bruce Tognazzini but he is so clueless that he is actually funny.
Chris Gehlker
<patri...@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
Such a good post that I feel like abandoning this thread. There is simply
nothing more to say.
Chris Gehlker
<kti...@nyc.rr.com> wrote:
> Says you <g>:
>
> from http://www.brain.riken.go.jp/bsinews/bsinews3/no3/speciale.html
>
> "It has also been made clear that the regions related to fear and anger
> are clearly segregated each other within the amygdala. The same is the
> case in the hypothalamus and in the midbrain central gray."
I'll be damned. There goes the rug from under my hypothesis.
Nils Goesche
> On 12/30/02 5:37 PM, in article
> cf333042.02123...@posting.google.com, "Kaz Kylheku"
> <k...@ashi.footprints.net> wrote:
>
> > VB-pushing idiots have nothing to be arrogant about, and are
> > too stupid to realize when someone proposes some wrong way of
> > doing something. Everything seems like a neat idea when all
> > you know is VB; the whole world resembles a child's crayon
> > drawing hanging on a refridgerator, depicting sunshine, stick
> > figures holding hands, bees landing on flowers and the like.
> >
> > Speaking of C, the comp.lang.c newsgroup is one of the most
> > hostile ones. It's probably worse than comp.lang.lisp.
>
> I simply can't find anything posted on comp.lang.c over the
> last three days that sounds remotely as angry as your paragraph
> that I quoted above.
Look harder, then. Maybe google for comp.lang.c and ``Kaz
Kylheku´´ for a start ;-) Also, look for ``Dan Pop´´. Our local
politeness freaks should also google for Richard Heathfield, an
extremely polite English Gentleman who never gets out of line but
for some reason is regularly part of extremely vicious flame wars
(also in comp.programming) and being attacked by idiots accusing
him of all kinds of bad things (like being a Nazi and whatnot,
even though he only talks about C!?). Facing Erik's style, it is
not as easy to see that it is indeed the people attacking him and
not himself who is to blame for those flame wars, and seeing how
someone else who is always as polite as one can possibly be is
the target of the very same aggressions by very similar people
might be very instructive for our ``feel-good jerks (tm)´´.
Regards,
--
Nils Gösche
Ask not for whom the <CONTROL-G> tolls.
PGP key ID #xD26EF2A0
Chris Gehlker
Goesche" <n...@cartan.de> wrote:
>> Chris Gehlker <geh...@fastq.com> writes:
>>
>> I simply can't find anything posted on comp.lang.c over the
>> last three days that sounds remotely as angry as your paragraph
>> that I quoted above.
>
> Look harder, then. Maybe google for comp.lang.c and ``Kaz
> Kylheku创 for a start ;-) Also, look for ``Dan Pop创. Our local
> politeness freaks should also google for Richard Heathfield, an
> extremely polite English Gentleman who never gets out of line but
> for some reason is regularly part of extremely vicious flame wars
> (also in comp.programming) and being attacked by idiots accusing
> him of all kinds of bad things (like being a Nazi and whatnot,
> even though he only talks about C!?).
I tried this experiment to discover that Kaz was apparently less angry when
he was a regular contributor to the C lists. Dan Pop doesn't appear to be
angry at all, and if anybody is attacking Richard Heathfield, Google knows
it not.
Rolf Marvin Bře Lindgren
| But fear/anger or concern/annoyance if you prefer milder terms, are at root
| the same emotion. At least the physiologists & social psychologists think
| so.
I would *love* to see the sources of this assertion. I'm a
psychologist, by the way.
Ingvar Mattsson
> On 12/30/02 1:32 PM, in article 87ptrjw...@ix.netcom.com, "Gabe Garza"
> <g_g...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> > Chris Gehlker <geh...@fastq.com> writes:
> >
> >> This is all speculation anyway. I did do one experiment to test it though. I
> >> searched a couple of Visual Basic groups for any signs that the posters were
> >> as angry as the typical poster here. They clearly are not.
> >
> > If Common Lisp was as widely accepted as Visual Basic, maybe the
> > posters here would be holding hands and dancing under the rainbow
> > too. :)
>
> It's weird though. I don't think that very many people think VB is an
> especially good language. Around here it's what gets taught, along with Java
> and C#, at the trade schools and junior colleges. Lisp is still the language
> at the university. I see below that you think that changing in some academic
> areas. When MS first announced .Net there was a perception among the VB
> programmers that they were abandoning VB altogether. Then there was real
> fear and anger.
Do the people in the VB group(s) get random people starting to post to
the group about how fundamentally flawed their language is and how
they would be much better off using something *vastly* better instead
and how *oibviously* the VB specification/reference is incorrect in
that it states <fact>?
That is, to my eye, what is currently the root cause of quite a few of
the harsh feelings. The rest seems to be harsh feelings about harsh
feelings.
//Ingvar
--
(defun m (a b) (cond ((or a b) (cons (car a) (m b (cdr a)))) (t ())))
Bulent Murtezaoglu
[...]
FAA> * A single file simplifies the installation and
FAA> uninstallation of the program, as well as making it less easy
FAA> for a naive user to screw up the system once installed
FAA> (people will delete the oddest things).
FAA> * It's easier to download a single file than a bunch of them
FAA> when desconstructing archival files is not possible.
Yes to both. I occasionally whip up mini gui's in Tcl/Tk to help clients
figure out what exactly it is they want. I use prowrap to produce a
standalone .exe which contains the libs and the script itself. It is VERY
handy to stick a 3-4Mb exe somewhere shoot an e-mail saying "get this file
from this URL, save it onto your desktop and doubleclick on it."
FAA> * I really don't want to use Lisp and am trying to find a
FAA> reason why it won't work for me.
FAA> I believe that the last reason is the main reason that causes
FAA> the requirement to be added.
Not for me, then again I don't post wishes for stand-alone executables
either. BTW, Lispworks and possibly Allegro do have this 'one file, stand
alone executable' facility.
cheers,
BM
Pascal Costanza
> "Tim Bradshaw" <t...@cley.com> wrote in message
> news:ey3of73...@cley.com...
>
>>The last person who could be thought of as being hounded out of cll
>>who I can think of was Ilias, although he kind of hounded himself out
>>- I think by the end that basically no one would talk to him and he
>>got bored and wandered off. Can anyone - *anyone* - give examples of
>>someone who really had a lot (or anything) to contribute who was
>>hounded out?
>
>
> Well, for various definitions of "contribute" and "hound out" I always
> thought that way about Erann Gat's long absence.
I second that.
>>I think that there are two relevant features of cll which make it
>>somewhat ruder than (some - by no means all) other groups. (1) There
>>are a relatively large number of people who turn up with extremely
>>wrong and very negative views, and who are not interested in learning
>>the truth.
>
>
> I really do agree with this. Ignorance when given the confidence that comes
> with popular consensus is a formidable force. Logic and reason often have
> little effect.
I have made different experiences. It's hard for Lisp newbies to get the
basic facts about Lisp right, but I have made the experience that if you
explain those facts repeatedly then they get it. It's much more
effective than telling them that they are stupid and should grow up and
what not. I have made this experiment recently in comp.lang.python and
have seen two things happening: (1) People weren't nearly as hostile as
some are in cll. (2) Some people have understood the basic facts about
Lisp, and I have gotten some wonderful feedback.
You can easily find the thread in google.
Pascal
--
Pascal Costanza University of Bonn
mailto:cost...@web.de Institute of Computer Science III
http://www.pascalcostanza.de Römerstr. 164, D-53117 Bonn (Germany)
Ingvar Mattsson
> Tim Bradshaw <t...@cley.com> writes:
>
> > I even think Perl is cool, in a mutant sort of way.
>
> So, what's your opinion on Tcl? :-)
If you replace [] with () and {} with '() it sort-of looks like a
line-oriented lisp (where, of course, each line in and of itself
should have ( at the start and ) at the end).
//Ingvar
--
((lambda (x) `(,x ',x)) '(lambda (x) `(,x ',x)))
Probably KMP