I also direct them to various
web sites which explain why lisp is appropriate
for various tasks, and is especially handy for
prototyping language implementations.

The reason I'm writing here, is that it would also seem
appropriate to direct students to read comp.lang.lisp
to see some informed discussion of various issues
related to Common Lisp.  However the level of discussion
of technical issues seems to degenerate to ad hominem
arguments (i.e. personal attacks) rather more often
than necessary. While we may have varying tolerances
for off topic humor, it seems to me that it does a
disservice to people (like my students) who
might look at this newsgroup as a resource. Instead they come
away with a rather negative impression of the lisp
community.

I am not advocating external censorship,
but just a realization on the part of
the contributors that their messages are perhaps
widely read (and certainly archived for future readers).

Quite a number of threads here are serious and valuable
discussions, at least for a while, and that makes it
tempting to point people this way.

It is in many peoples' nature to try to get
in the last word, or the ultimate zinger. Unmoderated
newsgroups don't really allow this  (i.e. the moron can
always respond!). What to do?  I think it is
possible to be civil even in the face of incivility,
ignorance, or malice.  Often an adequate and civil response
is to not respond at all. I suggest we try to factor
such considerations into our participation, with the
intention of making the newsgroup useful to a wider
audience and perhaps more reflective of what lisp
is about. Thanks.

So I think the answer is that cll is a newsgroup, and it's like
newsgroups are: full of people with no lives or social skills who
scream at each other through a conveniently safe medium: not many
people have been killed by newsgroup articles, no matter how
incandescent.

I don't think people should assume that cll represents any kind of
community other than that of people who contribute to it, and if
they're not used to usenet, well they should be warned about what it's
like, because they'll have the same experience elsewhere.

--
J.... B....

Rather than wait for a change in the nature of this group before
directing students here, you might want to give your students a primer
on how to survive comp.lang.lisp

Might I suggest these ideas:

1.  Read before posting.  If you intend to join the community long
    term, it would be a good idea to read it for several weeks before
    joining in.

2.  Do your homework.  If you have a quick question, check the
    archives to see if it has already been discussed or answered.

3.  At least *attempt* to do your homework.  If you have a homework
    problem that you can't solve, show us what you have so far.

4.  Keep it technical and on topic.  If you have a question, ask it.
    Remember that opinions are like assholes:  everyone's got one, and
    no one wants to look at anybody else's.

5.  Don't take it personally.  You haven't arrived until someone damns
    you to eternal perdition or cast aspersions on the genetic makeup
    of your ancestors.  Remember, it is better to keep your mouth shut
    and have people suspect you are an idiot than to open it and
    dismiss all doubt.

6.  This is comp.lang.lisp, not comp.lang.scheme, comp.lang.perl,
    or comp.lang.c++  If you prefer these languages, hang out there.
    Believe it or not, many of the people in comp.lang.lisp actually
    program in languages other than lisp and are up to date on the
    latest trends in computing.

the best you can do for them as an instructor is to allow
that old trees gather lots of monkies and moss, and it is
a good idea to cut open the fruit to check for worms.
then work very hard to demonstrate those principles you
favor in behavior and thought.  i would be glad to be a
student of yours, then.

All this is to say that if they can't deal with c.l.lisp, I don't see
how they could have dealt with Berkeley so far.  Give them a warning
of what it can be like, and they should be fine.

The one I would like to add:
In the subject clearly label it as homework.  The Idea is that the
student would get a different kind of help then otherwise.  And he
would be known as an honest person, which does help here.

c.l.l. is only *one* part of the lisp community.

i don't believe that the real experts write in this forum.

you got a few answers from regular posters.

They confirm me once more the unripe thinking of many people here.

e.g.: "Mr. policeman, my neighbour has killed his wife, so where's the
big deal with what i've done? i'm civilized enough to break only the
legs of mine"

Of course, there are some highlights here. Calmy people, with the
awareness of their limits, with respect to individuality and to the
process of sharing knowledge.

-

as long as your students *don't think*, they are not 'in danger'.

yes, they have to stop thinking.

*never* detect a weak point of lisp and publish it.

-

as a general introduction to c.l.lisp, see this article.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=and7hh$k1...@usenet.otenet.gr

the 3 links at the end of the posting have further introduction into the
'ruling' of c.l.lisp.

-

as a general rule, advice students to talk like this:

"helo you brilliant lisp folks. i'm a worthless lisp novice, please
teach me. I don't like to read to much literature, cause i prefere to
taste the wisdom of your expertise."

then they will have no problem.

if you have a genious in your class, advice him to reduce his analytical
strength, so he will not be detected.

-

finally see this topics as a showcase for what happens, if you attack
holy things:

The Scary Readtable () => []
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=amsq4a$cr...@usenet.otenet.gr

R5RS Scheme
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=amsm9l$3u...@usenet.otenet.gr

backquote, Error in the specs 0.1 (unclear document, much responses):
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=amc48r$hc...@usenet.otenet.gr

backquote, Error in the specs 0.6 (clear document, no responses)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=an4ic3$om...@usenet.otenet.gr

-

i write this, as usual, for every person that reads c.l.lisp.

-

i just realise that i should build a small webpage with the organized
links. yes. this i do. so people can see quickly what happens in cll.

-

The Spirit of Lisp.

Others, myself included have pointed out what we perceive as a serious
defect with this forum - namely, that it discourages newcomers from
posting for fear they will be unnecessarily eviscerated by those who
seem to live to vituperate.

Your students are precisely the sort of newcomers to this forum who
are most likely to get their heads bitten off by gratuitiously hurtful
correspondents to this forum. Being somewhat irrational, or at best,
social-skills-challenged, these hostile posters are exceedingly
unliklely to comply with your request.

In other words, I wish you and your students the best, but I wouldn't
count on the tone of this newsgroup changing much unless they are an
exceptionally courageous group. Why? In order for newbies to have the
confidence to post here, they have to see other newbies, preferably
many, post either without incident, or at least post and shrug off the
unecessary viciousness. The former, experience teaches us, happens all
too rarely. The latter would require the aforementioned exceptional
courage.

BTW, calls for a c.l.l.moderated have generally been shouted down here
as well. I personally feel that it would be be the best solution,
especially if civil, on-topic threads/posts from the unmoderated group
were cross-posted by the moderator. Part of the problem is finding a
volunteer to moderate.

  ``what is the right way???''

My reply was:   ``Take a look at the function READ-DELIMITED-LIST
for an example of how to do it.''

And your response was variously:
  ``i think this is not the right way.''
  ``*why* should I try it''
  ``i feel it is the *wrong* way''
  ``As an experienced lisp coder you should be able to write it in 5"''
  ``i think you are not able to''
  ``what he [jrm] said is irrelevant''

----

I think all of Joe's suggestions are excellent ones and if they are followed
your students should be able to benefit a great deal from subscribing to
this group.

From a strictly personal point of view I welcome and strongly encourage
thoughtful questions from newbies and think there is a lot to gain for the
group in general by more of this (keeping in mind Joe's advice).

To answer a couple of the OP's other points:

A newsgroup is simply an ongoing flow of articles which share a common
identifier in the Newsgroups: line. It's not a service at all. Service
is the performance of some task performed in exchange for some
compensating value.

From ``cs.berkeley.edu'', I surmise that you are not teaching a class
of elementary school children, but rather mostly young adults, many of
whom not only do not require protection from hostility, but seek
depictions of it in various entertainment media, such as movies and
popular music.

  For some reason, you appear to believe that it is OK to be an idiot and
  not OK to ask people to think.  Your students should instead learn that
  it may be OK to be an arrogant ignorant with a chip on their shoulder
  among "friends" who "tolerate" you, but out in the big wide open where
  monsters roam, you get eaten alive if you (1) act like an idiot, (2) do
  not accept criticism of your actions but take them personally (and see
  point 1), and (3) defend /yourself/ instead of trying to understand the
  technical points raised against your position or claim (and see point 1).

  The purpose of a newsgroup is not to prove oneself worthy or to make
  people feel validated or to approve of someone's position.  The purpose
  of a newsgroup is to let people share experiences and knowledge and even
  wisdom, to give those who want to learn an opportunity to save themselves
  a lot of trouble by listening to the experiences of others instead of
  going through the costly process of learning everything by doing.  People
  who share their experiences tend to socialize, as well, and a community
  of people who have experiences worth sharing can be both extremely
  rewarding for its members as well as appear exclusive to people who have
  no experiences to speak of, yet.  But the key is to acquire experience,
  not to criticize those who have it for having it.

  This goes to "respect for your elders", which all to few brights students
  have because they have been able to learn from the great minds that went
  before them tens, hundreds, if not thousands, of times faster than these
  predecessors learned it.  Of course you get cocky and arrogant when you
  spend a few months at most on all of the works of Aristtotle, summarizing
  his entire life in the week or so it takes to read it all.  Of course you
  get cocky and arrogant when you enter a world of mathematics that has
  taken hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of man-years to develop and
  you only spend half a dozen years to a decade before you "improve" on it
  with your own doctorate.

  The enormously exaggerated pace of the student through people's minds, as
  it were, causes the first meeting with Reality to feel like a screeching
  halt or a massive chain collision with the rear end of the much slower
  pace of today's practiioners.  It is when you realize that while you
  could learn about everything people have done in your narrow field of
  study, doing enough to be worth learning /about/ by somebody else later
  on will take the rest of your life and you might end up with a one-line
  reference to your entire life's work in the next generation's textbooks
  only if you are /really/ good, that you also should realize that your own
  advanced education included only the highlights of other people's life
  and that the researcher's /real/ life is completely, utterly unglamorous,
  but for some strange reason, bright students acquire this arrogance that
  they present to the world in "oh, shut up you old fart, I can summarize
  your 50 years of experience in a poorly researched term paper", but not
  the humility that goes with it, that 50 years hence, some arrogant snot
  will summarize /their/ 50 years of experience in a poorly researched term
  paper.  This brutal meeting with Reality is often excruciatingly painful
  for the bright student who has breezed through course after course with
  an attitude like "I'm so smart, I don't need to study this".  And sadly,
  the brighter, the more arrogant, despite their staggering ignorance of
  the issue at hand.

  Therefore, it is the dury of every practitioner in a field to hold up a
  huge "STOP" sign for these arrogant ignorants and to show them that it
  takes /years/ of concerted effort by lots of people to actually improve
  on anything at all.  Those who come to a newsgroup with people who have a
  decade or two of actual experience with an "I have this neat idea", get a
  priceless favor for free when they are told it was rejected 30 years ago.
  The arrogant snot who has read some Scheme and thinks he gets it, is done
  a tremendous favor by being told to go stuff it when he argues against a
  feature in Common Lisp.  In both cases, people who have their nose broken
  by running headlong into a door while in an /inconsequential/ setting
  like Usenet are both saved from embarrassing themselves in their first
  job, and save their employers the cost of teaching them this lesson.

  Nothing short of a first, harsh brush with Reality will tell the arrogant
  and /relatively/ ignorant student (despite his inflated self-image) that
  he is mistaken in his belief that other people's efforts do not matter,
  that they can be taken for granted.  Just because he has spent the last
  half dozen years pushing the proverbial lever and getting the proverbial
  pellet of food from his professor or supervisor does not mean that anyone
  else is under any obligation to give him any pellets no matter how hard
  he pushess his lever.  Just because he has spent the last half dozen
  years with a very simple, very restricted effort-reward system and has
  learned to excel at this game, does not mean that he can play this game
  anywhere else in the real world.  Most of the time, people who excelled
  in something so narrow that only their professor can really value it, are
  tremendously ignorant of things outside that narrow field and people
  outside their narrow field have an alarming tendency to go "so what?" if
  they attempt to flash their credentials.  For many a bright student, this
  amounts to nothing short of a total reversal of their entire value system.

| It is in many peoples' nature to try to get in the last word, or the
| ultimate zinger.

  Surprisingly often, those who enage in this petty game are those whose
  weltanschauung has been threatened and they are desperately trying to
  recover the ground that vanished beneath their feet.  It is the obligation
  of those who actually know better to deny them their security blanket and
  force them deal with a reality they do not know.

| I think it is possible to be civil even in the face of incivility,
| ignorance, or malice.

  But to what end?  The arrogant and relataively ignorant punk will not get
  the lesson he /needs/ if people kowtow to his arrogance and reaffirm his
  stupid notion of superiority over those who have the actual experience of
  which he has only learned a brief summary.  How many young people have
  not had to be put in their proper place when they start to do real work?
  Was all of that from malice?  Or was it perhaps instead from love of the
  field, that although it could be reduced to a paragraph in a textbook for
  one who does not study it, it is actually the bread and butter of the
  lives of thousands of people and billions of dollars' worth world-wide?
  If you take a shower and flushing your toilet for granted, it still means
  that a tremendous amount of effort went into the science and engineering
  of water and refuse systems and the arrogant ignorant who thinks it was
  no big deal to build such an advanced society would literally have no
  idea what to do on his own.  If he ever got to deal with the people who
  not only made this system work for everyone, every single day, everywhere,
  but made it /possible/ to take it for granted, which is the ultimate in
  technological and social achievement -- should he be allowed to take it
  for granted or should they expect this snotty, arrogant jerk to accept an
  attitude readjustment?

| Often an adequate and civil response is to not respond at all. I suggest
| we try to factor such considerations into our participation, with the
| intention of making the newsgroup useful to a wider audience and perhaps
| more reflective of what lisp is about. Thanks.

  If you love the work you do, tolerating arrogant ignorants is impossible.
  If you do not care much about your own work, it is trivially easy to
  accept that others do not value it, either.  If you want high tolerance
  of arrogant shitheads, the only way to achieve that is to ask people to
  care less about their work and what other things they value.

  Perhaps you should just keep your students more in line and prepare them
  for a world that does not care how smart they think they are?  The first
  thing you should teach your students before they venture out into the
  real world and the Usenet that is part of it, is this: They are on their
  own.  You will not be there to reward them and neither will anyone else
  unless they make a /real/ contribution.  The /real/ contribution is /not/
  being able to think ahead of the educational program and be a lot smarter
  than expected.  The expectations of competency and skill are not set low
  enough that some fraction of the population is going to excel.  They are
  set so high that if anyone actually excels, it is flat out /unexpected/.
  Most A+ students get a C in life.  How long would the caring professor
  keep that grade a secret to the student?  Or would he let the student
  know as early as possible so he had a chance to improve his chances?

and examine it there.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3D6FD4CE.6010...@pontos.net

full context:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=alpriu%24h89%242%40usenet.otenet.gr

-

you seem to forget quickly.

you can reread the thread.

read-delimited-list does not work in this context.

a few of your friends have agreed to this.

of course silent & not with a direct reply like:

"stranger! ilias! I apologize. Your intuition was right."

-

  That would be yourself.  You extrapolate from yourself to others in a way
  that is truly hostile and unreasonable.  When you could get sufficient
  help to get over your personal problems, you will see that you were part
  of the problem and exacerbated it.  Until you understand your own role
  and think you can blame somebody else for your own behavior, you will
  continue to be a part of the problem.

| Others, myself included have pointed out what we perceive as a serious
| defect with this forum - namely, that it discourages newcomers from
| posting for fear they will be unnecessarily eviscerated by those who seem
| to live to vituperate.

  You impute intention, purpose, and motive to people that you have made a
  serious effort to annoy.  From my point of view, you are clearly insane
  since you keep believing your preconceived notion the more it is refuted.

| gratuitiously hurtful correspondents

  Just because you are too fucking prejudicial to grasp what is going on
  does not mean it is gratuitious, you unspeakably hostile shithead.

| Being somewhat irrational, or at best, social-skills-challenged, these
| hostile posters are exceedingly unliklely to comply with your request.

  Please quite extrapolating from your severely limited experience.

| unecessary viciousness.

  Just because you are too stupid to see the necessity does not mean it is
  not there.

| BTW, calls for a c.l.l.moderated have generally been shouted down here as
| well. I personally feel that it would be be the best solution, especially
| if civil, on-topic threads/posts from the unmoderated group were
| cross-posted by the moderator. Part of the problem is finding a volunteer
| to moderate.

 Do you think anything you have ever posted to comp.lang.lisp would get
 through in a moderated forum?  I would favor moderation to get rid of you.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

I think your definition of service is not correct either in its inclusion of
"exchange for compensation".  (I would like to avoid any philosophical
quibbles about the ultimate motivations for an action one chooses though, if
you don't mind, I think you are using "compensating value" in its more
immediate sense.)  Nor is an active disservice the necessary alternative to
provision of a service.

But I grant you that a newsgroup does not exist only or even primarily as a
service.  It can however provide one.  I often use other groups (and have
used this one) as a way to get specific questions answered ie requesting a
free service.  I don't think its wrong per se.  I am happy to provide the
same service to others when I can.

Ilias has posted legitimate questions, questions which would appear on a
moderated newsgroup - not all his posts are free verse on the "spirit of
lisp."

I think it's really disingenuous to paint any move toward a
c.l.l.moderated as an attempt to exclude certain posters. Any moderated
newsgroup is an attempt to exclude certain kinds of *posts* -
specifically, those that are off topic. Whether these posts are off
topic because they don't deal with the subject of the newsgroup in
question, or because they are merely abusive attacks on another poster,
in the end, makes little difference. Both are undesirable noise.

Some people require such a thrashing with the clue stick that they
wouldn't survive; this appears to be one of those situations.  

All you're doing by continuing the conversation is encouraging the
clueless one's continued participation, and encouraging continued
"incivility."