Suppose I argue against "Scheme is a Lisp" with a one-bit person, and
  either deny that this is true or actually say "Scheme is not a Lisp".  A
  one-bit person would not see this as different from "Scheme is a
  non-Lisp" -- because to him, there can be no such difference.  I find
  this quite fantastically irrational, but I do not think a lack of
  education can have caused it.  This gets even more irrational when a
  one-bit person wants to deny "Scheme is not a Lisp" (which he reads as
  "non-Lisp").  In order to establish the falsehood of a claim that
  something "is" a non-thing, it should suffice to point out only a few
  qualities that contradict the identity or membership in "non-thing", and
  if you can establish that it is not a non-thing, then, by virtue of the
  one-bit person's two-value system, it must be a thing!  Of course, there
  is no limit to how silly this can get: What is "non-Lisp"?  Leaving aside
  the fact that non-Lisp has all the wrong qualities, while "Lisp" has all
  the good ones (please remember that we deal with one-bit people) and that
  this causes strong emotional reactions to even weak denials of "Scheme is
  a Lisp", the fight they engage in more concerns getting out of the
  dreaded "non-Lisp" camp than into the warm and welcoming "Lisp" camp.  I
  think the emotional processes of a one-bit person who wants Scheme to a
  member of the Lisp family (expressed incompetently as "Scheme is a Lisp")
  actually depends on so much irrational two-value logic that it results in
  abject fear that if they lose their ties to Lisp, they will become
  "non-Lisp", and that is certainly the worst possible fate.

  I have seen a number of Scheme freaks argue very strongly with a mish-
  mash of negative statements, probably thinking that _their_ negative is a
  positive, but the real world does not have only one bit, it is not all
  black or all white.  The idiotic "shades of gray" does not apply, either,
  of course.  Instead, we have lots of small things that are black to some
  people and white to others, like billions and billions of them.  The
  _result_ forms a "shade of gray", but each individual decision is pretty
  clear to each person, at least once it becomes conscious.  What I find so
  odd about this failure to grasp negation is the abject failure to see
  that every position consists of a huge number of decisions.  For some
  weird reason, one-bit people seem to add up a lot of bits and still get
  back only one-bit answers.

  Even more frustratingly, one-bit people think that other people have only
  ont bit, too.  So when you argue against something they believe, you
  argue not only against their specific argument, but against their entire
  _being_.  To contradict a position is equivalent to contradict the entire
  universe as they know it.  They cannot flip just one switch, but must
  flip them all.  The only thing you can tell these people is "you need
  more bits!", but that does not compute in their one-bit universe.

  Some people think that only boolean operators should be subject to
  negation, i.e., the not operator, so (not #f) => #t, and (not #t) => #f,
  but all other arguments to not should signal an error.  Common Lisp
  treats all non-nil values a boolean true, but not returns a canonical
  true, the symbol t, and several one-bit people have expressed a serious
  gripw with this, just as they gripe loudly that car and cdr return nil
  when given nil as argument, that nil and the empty list and false are the
  same, etc.  Purity of design to one-bit people means precisely that a
  thing is only what it is and moreover that everything else is not that
  thing so they can actually reason with one-bit negation.

  Since the resistance among one-bit people to increase the number of bits
  is enormous, close in magnitude to believing in more deities, there is no
  resolution of this problem.  One can only hope to identify one-bit people
  as early as possible, and since they have their own newsgroup, I think
  the one-bit people should _stay_ in comp.lang.scheme, where the simple
  one-bit logic seems to apply to everything and where they can actually be
  reasonably certain to be accurate if they accuse other people of thinking
  in terms of One True Way and the like, which is goddamn annoying to n-bit
  people.

Well argued. Damn, I was hoping for an `Arc is a Scheme' thread. :-)

When mathematics is all you care about, all you see is how
effective the mathematical way of reasoning is.  Because it leads
to great results, whenever you apply it to something you care
about, that is.  Of course you realize that it somehow doesn't
work as good when you deal with people outside the mathematics
building, but that is easily explained:  Those people are
obviously just lacking the proper mathematical training :-)

When Rudolph Carnap et al tried to establish a general theory
of science in the twenties, they first tried to extend the
mathematical way to all of science -- but quickly realized that
that wouldn't work at all.  Now, all of serious science is rather
done in a way Karl Popper described, and not in the mathematical way
at all -- pretty much only mathematicians could go on working their
own way (and theoretical computer science is just a field of
mathematics, mostly).

But a mathematician doesn't have to understand this:  Mathematics
works just as it has always worked.  I was cured -- but only
because I left the university.  And I know that there would have
been no way at all to explain these things to my ``former self''.
I just wouldn't have known what you were talking about.  Just
like in that thread about Scheme :-)

Regards,
--
Nils Goesche                          PGP key ID 0x42B32FC9

That is a fine example of "one-bit thinking".  He insists that this
newsgroup is for Common Lisp ONLY, and that this is so blindingly
obvious that the people who disagree must be either malicious or
idiotic.

I'm *perfectly* happy with fuzzy boundaries; but fuzziness means that
there is going to be flexibility, giving and taking, and an openness
to learning from other ways of doing things.  

Erik does not demonstrate that.

Indeed, he pretends to be a "two bit" person in the very article in
which he seems to articulate an iron wall between the one bit people
and the two bit people.  

Regards,
--
Nils Goesche
"Don't ask for whom the <CTRL-G> tolls."

Anyway, again having only read that far, I could easily see the point of view
of the one-bit person.  After all, didn't I take a logic class that taught "if
f(x) and g(x) generate the same truth table, then f is equivalent to g"?

But then, this uses exactly the one-bit reasoning you so dislike.

Hmmm ... Speaking of logic:

    "All X are Y"     does-not-imply          "All Y are X"

Thus, even if "all Lisps are members-of-the-Lisp-family-of-languages", that
doesn't mean that "all members-of-the-Lisp-family-of-languages are Lisps".

To use the classic example from logic class, the assertion "all crows are
black", even if true, doesn't imply that some specific black bird is a crow.

So the Schemers appear to make a classic logical mistake:

Major premise (M): All Lisps are members-of-the-Lisp-family-of-languages
minor premise (m): Scheme is a member-of-the-Lisp-family-of-languages
Conclusion    (C): Scheme is a Lisp           ; (wrong)

I have much less experience with Lisp than most of y'all, I suspect, but I
don't think anyone, even the Schemers, would argue with either the major or
the minor premise.  But the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises.

One could also, perhaps, phrase their argument like this:

M: Scheme is a member-of-the-Lisp-family-of-languages
m: All members-of-the-Lisp-family-of-languages are Lisps
C: Scheme is a Lisp

I don't know enough about "members-of-the-Lisp-family-of-languages" to say,
but many people that apparently *do* know a lot about that family appear to
disagree with the minor premise in this syllogism.  So the logic here works,
but one of the assumptions (arguably) doesn't, so we can't agree with the
conclusion here, either.

Of course, one could argue that "being a Lisp" _means_ "being a
member-of-the-Lisp-family-of-languages", in which case all of this falls
apart.  :)  But now I'm just repeating everybody else, 'cause many people have
remarked that it all depends on what you mean by "X is a Lisp".

I think part of the problem lies in perspective.  Consider John and Guy.  Both
start on different journeys from John's house.  John goes north-west and Guy
goes north-east.  Gale looks at John and Guy from a long way south, and they
appear very similar to her, and they appear to travel in similar directions
(i.e. away from her).  She approaches them, gets to John's house, and shouts
at John, "Hey, Guy, why don't you go over there with John?"  This annoys John,
because she's mistaken him for Guy, and because she has stubbornly held on to
the judgment she made while far away, that John & Guy both travel in the same
direction.

This analogy breaks down, because while it explains newbies coming to Lisp or
Scheme and mistaking one for the other, and it touches on the hostility of
Lispers when people mistake them for Schemers or assume that Scheme and Lisp
are "the same", it doesn't explain the apparent propensity for Schemers to say
"Oh, me and John, we're the same."  Anyone who looks at them close up can see
their differences, and especially their different directions.

Most of this deals at best tangentially to your main topic.  Perhaps I
should've attached it to the "why isn't Scheme a Lisp" thread.

  They have their own forum.  Dude, USENET works just this way.  The fact
  that you Scheme freaks do nothing but raise hell here, anyway, and manage
  perfectly without my help, provides clear evidence of the existence of an
  underlying conflict.  Newsgroups are _created_ in order to have people be
  nice to eachother in a setting where they are not constantly under attack
  from some anal-retentive assholes like yourself and other Scheme freaks.

| That is a fine example of "one-bit thinking".

  No, dear one-bit person.  You just see it that way.  Q.E.D.

| He insists that this newsgroup is for Common Lisp ONLY

  I do?  Because I want Scheme, which has a Scheme-only newsgroup, actually
  to use it to discuss Scheme?  You see, dear one-bit person, just because
  you have this magical inference engine that is churning out all sorts of
  things that nobody argues, does not mean that you arrive at conclusions
  that apply in this universe.  This is _not_ a one-bit universe

| and that this is so blindingly obvious that the people who disagree must
| be either malicious or idiotic.

  Scheme freaks who come here to answer Common Lisp questions with Scheme
  answers certainly appear lacking in _several_ mental departments.

| I'm *perfectly* happy with fuzzy boundaries; but fuzziness means that
| there is going to be flexibility, giving and taking, and an openness to
| learning from other ways of doing things.

  Would you be happy with my posting Common Lisp answers to every Scheme
  question I care to answer in comp.lang.scheme, too?  If not, why not?
  Have you seen how the mentally unstable Scheme freaks respond to _any_
  Common Lisp articles in their forum at all?

| Erik does not demonstrate that.

  Really?  Just because I disagree with you, and you refuse to budge a bit,
  _I_ suddenly demonstrate lack of flexibility?  Are you for real?

| Indeed, he pretends to be a "two bit" person in the very article in which
| he seems to articulate an iron wall between the one bit people and the
| two bit people.

  Cute, but I actually said n-bit.

  Thomas, grow up.  Get over your inability to deal with disagreement and
  my harsh responses to your stupidity.  Just do _better_, act _smarter_.
  Regressing to a whining child who tells lies about people who have not
  hurt you just because you feel hurt leads to all sorts of conclusions
  about your mental stability and capacity that do you no good in the long
  run.  Probably not the short run, either, but you would never see that.

  The thread started when you joked about set! and I joked back with a
  point about the difference between the Scheme and Common Lisp
  communities, and joking called Common Lisp a real Lisp and Scheme a toy
  Lisp, which caused you to blow your fuse and revert to a 5-year-old
  kicking and screaming, inventing stuff you could attack other people for
  because what they did in fact say could not keep your anger and your
  stupid self-rightesous flaming going.

| Who are these people?  I haven't seen *anyone* denounce Common Lisp here.
| I'm told that Tom Lord used to, but he doesn't seem to be around here at
| present.

  Your observational skills are so questionable that whether you have seen
  anyone do anything is completely irrelevant.  You cannot even _report_
  what other people say without confusing it with your own opinion and you
  do not even read articles that disagree with your one-bit universe.

  But why are you trying to force people to accept your view?  Is not that
  precisely what you attack me for, even though I do no such thing?  You
  seem to want to control other people's impressions of what constitues
  Scheme propaganda and now what it means to denounce Common Lisp such that
  people have to fight through your obstinate refusal to listen to what
  people say.  This is the very definition of a troll.

| I don't; I haven't posted *any* "Scheme propaganda".

  Maybe it looks like it, like you think what I say looks like something I
  do not recognize at all?  Maybe you are nuts and your ability to predict
  what people mean and infer is somehow out of sync?  Maybe you are out of
  control and so emotionally disturbed by what you perceive as hostilities
  and personal attacks that you are no longer able to communicate at all?

  To quote Tom Lehrer: "I wish people who have trouble communicating would
  just shut up."

At this point, most of his articles (blessedly) escape my notice due
to the nifty automatic scoring of gnus.

  You blew your fuse when I said Scheme was a toy language.  Before that,
  you had compared Common Lisp to PL/1 and much other nastiness.  I want to
  be relieved of obnoxious trolls who attack the core reason for the
  existence of the community.  That means you, so you have a certain right
  to feel singled out as a bad guy, but you actually _are_, whether you
  want to accept it or not.  And you can quit any time.  I have asked you
  to stop lying about what I want and say and do, just because you want to
  get back at me for singling you out.  Pretty damn childish and immature
  of you, but you seem to be stuck in that behavioral pattern without any
  idea how to get our of it.  I sense a certain degree of panic in your
  question, too.

| Since I haven't seen anyone trumpet Scheme here, with the exception of
| one offhand comment I made about call/cc, what is Erik blathering about?

  How would you know what I write when you (1) do not read my articles, and
  (2) do not comprehend the message in those you read?  You have made up
  your mind about what I think, and the only person that is _not_ able to
  refute or change your views is -- me.  Mostly likely, you will listen
  only when somebody else says exactly the same thing I have said but
  without mentioning my name.  Erann Gat has this character flaw, too.

| He keeps saying I'm blind, ignoring what's obvious, etc., and yet, there
| isn't any actual reference to any actual words of mine (or anyone else)
| who is trumpeting Scheme in the way he finds so offensive.

  And you know these things with certainty because you do _not_ read what I
  write, right?

| At this point, most of his articles (blessedly) escape my notice due
| to the nifty automatic scoring of gnus.

  You remain a prejudiced idiot in my view, but you make tho choice of
  standing up in the crowd and announcing it.  Self-incrimination can be
  such a bonus to watch.  Schadenfreude, was it?

If Erik wants to be offended by me, that's fine, and it doesn't offend
me.

What offends me is not his offense, but the manner in which he
expresses it.

Its not unreasonable to build a mathematical structure to produce a
consistent way to talk about the relationships between computer
languages.  But taken in pieces rather than from some comprehensive
model, is just a way of couching opinions in what looks like reason.

I think the scheme is lisp question is more a matter of labeling.  Not
having a comprehensive model of computer language relationships, you
can draw your distinctions anywhere you like, and try to get others to
accept your conclusions.  Dictionaries don't provide a consistent
definition of terms, they just provide documentation for how terms are
being used, (or how they were used in the past).

I don't think people will have problems with this abbreviated grouping
of languages:

       (order-a  (species-a common-lisp x-lisp maclisp emacs-lisp ...)
                 (species-b scheme-r5 scheme-r4 gnome ...))

Species-b has always been called scheme.  I think most lisp people
would consider that species-a should be called lisp.  The question is
then: What do you call order-a?

Some people feel that order-a is what should be given the label
lisp.  But then they should feel obligated to give a reasonable label
to species-a.

I left out a genus level to avoid the question of intermediate
groupings, and where languages like dylan fit in.  I used species to
mean that you can write non-trivial code that is acceptable to all the
interpreters/compilers, without modification.  

My bias is that species-a should be called lisp, and there would be a
genus holding lisp, scheme, arc. that would be called lisp-like.
I follow biology in that it is the surface aspects of the language
that place it in the hierarchy, not its underlying mechanisms.  Bats
and Birds may be similar in being built to fly, but they are
programmed (in the DNA) quite differently.

  I repeat myself, but please quit lying about me and what I say and do.
  It is becoming increasingly clear to everyone here that you favor your
  own personal attacks at me so highly that any consistency in your ethics
  is no longer possible:  What you do is right and what I do is wrong.  Yet
  what you do is clearly wrong no matter how much moral righteousness you
  can muster.  Governor George W. Bush was of the moral caliber that reacts
  like "What!?  He _murdered_ someone?  Let's kill him!" and then he became
  President and went "They harbored terrorists who were so angry at the
  U.S. policies over many years that they _murdered_ 2500 of our people!!?
  What horrible terror!  Let's make it U.S. policy to murder 100,000 of
  their people, and maybe they will stop wanting to retaliate!"  I am quite
  sad that such a _moron_ can become president of a country I once looked
  up to, but with the approval rating that _idiot_ receives, I wonder what
  is wrong with the entire culture and the American population.  It also
  explains why being an utter idiot in public is somehow more acceptable
  among Americans, who now muster the most retarded moral justification for
  their out-of-control anger and misdirected desire for revenge of the
  people who _dare_ harm them because they act like idiots.  Idiots on
  USENET have become worse after the supreme idiot became president.

  FYI: I do not _like_ to make people aware of their idiotic behavior.  It
  is necessary, because otherwise they get away with it (which they have
  always done before, hence their current idiotic behavior) and behave even
  worse.  For most people, this works remarkably well -- they stop short of
  being idiots long before anyone has to drag out large caliber "insults",
  and they actually grasp what criticism of their behavior means and
  entails.  Only the idiots get called idiots, and they go on to prove it
  with a vigor that, IF IT WERE REDIRECTED TO THINK CLEARLY, would earn
  them a Nobel Prize in something.

  So, Thomas Bushnell, just stop behaving like a stupid child who has never
  experienced rejection of your beliefs -- it is not somebody else's fault
  that you believe something that they do not accept.  Scheme is no good
  outside of comp.lang.scheme.  Deal with it.  If you do not, and repeat
  more childish and stupid lies about other people, you must be corrected
  each and every time.  Acknowledge that you are exceptionally bad at
  understanding what people say when they do not agree with you completely
  from the outset, but we already have at least one example of a retard who
  "completely agrees" with something, yet has no concept of what it means
  to make use of his agreement.  People like that have _serious_ mental
  capacity problems, and the common phrase for this is precisely "idiot".
  However, it is not something you _are_ for the rest of your life.  JUST
  ACT SMARTER AND DISPROVE THE CHARGE and you can even succeed in putting
  it to shame.  The more you keep confirming it with idiotic
  counter-attacks, the more right I am about you.  Non-idiots do not act
  that way.  It is that simple.  Now, START TO THINK, DAMNIT!

  Stop doing things that need to be corrected and criticized and you will
  not be corrected and criticized.  if you turn to _attack_ those who
  correct and criticize you, you _are_ an idiot.  Listen, learn, use your
  brain.  Above all, do not lose sight of the purpose you have when you
  take part in a newsgroup community: It is _not_ to fight against those
  who criticize you.

  I fight you morons out of necessity, because idiots are more destructive
  than anything else: They make it harder for people to share their
  insight: having to respond to idiots who do not understand anything but
  think they know more than others, is taxing on people, even if they do
  not actually respond to them.  Even the presence of one idiot in a group
  of smart people can cause the whole group to deterioate.  Nothing mankind
  has done is worse than tolerance of idiocy, and that is basically what
  "manners" are for, since intelligent people figure out what they want
  from what they do and do not fight merely _against_ something they do not
  like.  I think Thomas Bushnell precisely _keeps_ fighting me because he
  fights _against_ me and he has yet to figure out what my signature means.

  On the other hand, I assume that you actually like to keep doing what you
  do.  It betrays a strange lack of ethics that depends on respecting
  people before you can respect them, and if you suddenly do not, well, you
  have no ethics at all.  It also confirms something I believe very
  strongly -- that some people are in need of a credible counter-force or
  counter-threat in order to behave.  If they think that their enemy cannot
  hurt them, they use _unlimited_ force.  Thomas Bushnell is the kind of
  person who apparently thinks that he is not hurt by what he does, and
  that my responses to his articles do not hurt him, either.  If this does
  not confirm my label "idiot" as applied to him, nothing will.  But let's
  get another round of self-incrimination from him on his journey to
  enlightenment.

  I keep saying that you need to be corrected and criticized when you keep
  posting lies about other people.  I keep arguing that your "disagreement"
  argument is completely misguided -- it is about posting known falsehoods,
  but this does not register with you, does it?  You want to be free to
  post lies and falsehoods and disinformation.  Sorry, no can do.  The
  purpose of posting to a public forum is such that those who know better
  than you do can correct you, and then you learn from them.  It is quite
  fantastically hostile to the core purpose of any exchange of information
  to repeat known falsehoods.  It wastes _everybody's_ time and is the most
  supreme act of disrespect and and disregard for other people's values.

  Only trolls think public fora exist for them to post known falsehoods for
  the enjoyment of seeing reasonable, caring people react to them.  I do
  not know about your enjoyment, yet, but when you manage to invent that I
  "like" calling you an idiot, it must come from somewhere.  I presume it
  is your own emotional state, that it gives you some sense of perverse
  satisfaction to lie and misrpresent and denigrate me, Thomas Bushnell.
  However, I think you are the "look what you made me do!" kine of person.

  I do not consider it possible to offend me personally, but I think people
  who _intend_ to offend others are morons, because to be "offended" by
  what somebody else says appears to me to be _immensely_ useless, and
  gives them far more credibility than they deserve.  Therefore, I think
  they confuse harsh treatment with offense and hostility.  Now, knowing
  what these people usually claim to have known beforehand (as if anyone
  should be swayed by someone's prejudice, a serious mental illness that is
  not treated medically, but should), what on earth prompted them to pick a
  fight with me to begin with?  What could possibly have caused a person to
  be offended by the response to an idiotic act of aggression towards
  someone who is "known" to respond harshly to idiotic behavior?  There is
  one possible conclusion: They really are staggeringly resounding evidence
  of their own idiocy.  Are there other conclusions?

  It is the contents of what people say that I respond to, not their manner
  (how could I?).  However, false accusations, disinformation, intellectual
  dishonesty of many kinds, all reduce the value of the forum in which they
  are presented.  I simply want people who do not value the forum and the
  community in which they live to go away.  Whether they spend their time
  denouncing the community effort and the basis of its existence or they
  invade us from another community with a serious lack of self-esteem, so
  they have to denounce what other people value in order to feel good about
  their own, probably wrong, choices, they are equally unwelcome.  I want
  to welcome people who come to a community and wonder "what is it that you
  value?  what do you agree on?" and I want the "your values are all wrong,
  your decisions are bad" crowd to go away and/or die.  People have come
  together because they believe in a few things and not in others.  Make
  these things explicit to those who want to know, argue their case to make
  things clear, and those who disagree _after_ they understand are free to
  offer suggestions in the spirit of what they understand.  Those who offer
  suggestions in their own spirit, only, and who disagree _before_ they
  understand are anathema to any serious community or forum.

  I find it strange to watch a person conclude that he must disrespect
  another for his own fabrications of what that other person has done and
  said.  I find it even stranger to see someone gain magical insight into
  another person's intentions and desires and use that as the basis for his
  attacks.  Yet, the strangest thing of all happens to people who I think
  are seriously lacking in intelligence: Their brain seems to latch into a
  curious state where the principle is "I think about this, therefore it
  exists" as opposed to a non-psychotic, rational mode of thinking that
  goes "this exists, therefore I think about it".  In the literature, this
  is usually considered a "psychotic break", or simply "going nuts'.  It is
  a curious thing to watch happen to people, indeed.

| What offends me is not his offense, but the manner in which he expresses
| it.

  You are the _only_ person responsible for what offends you.  Stop being
  offended.  If you use your emotional response as the reason to want to
  control other people and the reason for your attacks (note that they are
  no longer counter-attacks -- you lie about me without provocation), you
  have a very serious personality disorder that needs urgent attention.

  But overall, I think this is a "look what you made me do" kind of idiocy.
  Sot the only possible advice to Thomas Bushnell is: Accept responsibility
  for your own actions and emotional reactions.  What you feel and what you
  do cannot _possibly_ be anybody else's fault.  Feelings of revenge are
  perfectly OK.  Acts of revenge are proof positive of an idiot at work.