* John Foderaro <j...@xspammerx.franz.com>
> You guys make it sounds like the ANSI CL standard was handed down by God
> and it dare not be criticized.
Like most criminals who suddenly get this great political insight into
the law-making process when they get caught, you, too, confuse breaking
community standards with criticizing them. If you had criticized them
while upholding them, you would have gained respect and people would have
listened to you, because it would have meant that you would have followed
the _changing_ consensus and would be interested in helping build it.
Instead, you have a criminal mind, are a loose cannon and a person who
decides on his own when to uphold the laws and when to break them. This
is what a society of laws cannot tolerate in its citizens and community
based on a standard cannot tolerate in its members. You, sir, have no
business talking about criticizing any standards, because you obviously
would not follow a _changed_ standard, either, unless, of course, it was
your own, in which case the whole point of a standard is moot.
> It's not only our right to criticize it it's our *responsibility*. The
> language will never get better if we don't.
Most civilized people understand the difference between obeying the laws
while criticizing them and breaking them in a childish expression of
one's inability to articulate sufficiently thoughtful arguments to sway
those of a different mind to rethink their position and reach compromise.
> Some are so blinded by faith that they believe that everything in the CL
> spec is divine.
You should realize that this statement is a very grave insult to your own
intelligence and has absolutely no bearing on what anyone else thinks or
believes, simply because it is such a fucking insane thing to say.
> The fact is that it was designed by committee. It was a compromise. Not
> everything in it is a great idea, or even a good idea.
_Some_ of us prefer to live in a society where people respect each other
for their competence and professionalism despite their differences of
personal opinions and work through their conflicting desires within the
framework of compromise and imposed ritual, simply because we fully
understand what the alternative entails.
These are among the wider implications of your nutty "coding standards",
and people who are way smarter than you figured it out just reading them.
The wider implication of your incredibly stupid disrespect for compromise
is that you fully expect to _remain_ a stranger to the community. You do
not respect the fact that compromise is what makes it possible for lots
of people to work together for a common goal. That means that you do not
share in the common goal. With your disrespect for criticism of your
ways and your repetition of the exact same line of defense as last time
we fought over conformance, you have shown ourself to be an _enemy_ of
the common goal of those who base their work, money, and livelihood on
the standard and the ability of professional engineers to implement it.
I doubt that you will actually get the message, but it is not that you do
something different, it is that you are so hostile to the ways you think
you have improved upon. Case in point: I quit the SGML business when I
could no longer work with that stupid standard. I can rant and rave
freely about its braindamaged design and do any damn thing I please,
_because_ I quit working with SGML. No customers are harmed because of
my strong criticism of SGML and XML. Nobody has based their work and
their investments on my professional opinion about SGML for five years.
It is safe for me to be destructive to that community, because those who
might follow me are free to do so. I did _not_ make a huge public stink
about why SGML was a crock of shit when I quit, either. That would have
been seriously unprofessional and damaging personally to people I cared
about and who had cared about me. Actually finding a decent way out took
me half a year, but I knew I could no longer be part of that community
and I took that very seriously, both personally and professionally.
However, in your case, you are still a serious force within a serious
vendor serving this community. Your stupidity and reckless disregard for
your customers and those who still trust Franz Inc to deliver products
according to specification _will_ harm people and their investments.
This is not about IF* and LOOP, it is about whether Franz Inc will have
engineers working on their products who are professional enough to do a
good job implementing a standard they disagree with. I would frankly
want a vendor who agreed with me that the standard was good for me. This
is why I could not use CLISP, for instance -- its arrogant, nutty creator
went on record to tell the world he had broken things on purpose.
> The sad thing is that the religious zealots seem to have taken over this
> newsgroup (or at least they are the loudest). I laugh at them and I hope
> you do too. I hope that I can get a message through to the scientists
> out there who understand that CL is just a language with good points and
> bad points and that we must figure out how to make CL better and
> continually relevant to the current computing world.
> -john foderaro
> franz inc.
the Franz Inc company name makes it _much_ harder for me to work with
Franz Inc, and I am already strained because of your licensing policies.
I think you fail to appreciate the harm you do to your own livelihood
with the _unprofessional_ behavior you conduct in public when people
criticize _your_ supposedly "personal" opinions, which really are not at
all personal. They are your professional opinions, and while signing
with the Franz Inc company name, you indicate that if anybody wants to
deal with your company and with you professionally, they will also have
to deal with a company that goes public with a "fuck the standard"
attitude that I personally consider to be so amazingly self-destructive
that I have to question my involvement with Franz Inc because of it.
It was your retarded responses to the case issue that caused me to lose
much of my interest in helping Franz Inc the last time you aired your
stupid ego in this newsgroup, and I am frankly so disappointed with your
reckless lack of concern for the community and what it has agreed on that
I am probably not going to recommend that anyone I know use Allegro CL or
work with such an _unprofessional_ crowd as you imply that Franz Inc is
by signing with the company name. I know your position in the company
well, and I am loathe to give you business when I believe that by doing
so, I am helping you destroy the community I wish to be a part of. When
this case issue came up, and you did such a horribly unintelligent job of
it, I lost all trust in your code. I do not know which language you
really write your code in, but it is _not_ Common Lisp, and you will not
cater to those who want to use Common Lisp. You have demonstrated that
you will disregard the standard in favor of your own personal opinions,
and that is simply so _unprofessional_ that I cannot work with in _any_
professional capacity.
Just like when you blew it on the case issue and never realized what harm
you had done, this is another sad day for Common Lisp. If I were in
posititon to determine your employment with Franz Inc, I would fire you
because of the destructiveness you bring to the community, but I am not
in that position. I will, however, need to know from those who are, what
Franz Inc does to keep you away from those parts of its product line that
could be influenced by your utter disrespect for the community standard
that your customers want you to implement. I have been on your case as
long as I have worked with Franz Inc to ensure that conformance is an
issue, but as time goes on, that commitment is hollowed out by you in
particular, despite the valiant efforts of your colleagues to assure me
that conformance is a priority. Yet, you seem to take _pride_ in your
antisocial behavior and your disrespect for compromise so I leave you no
hope of recovery and will have to work around you if I continue to work
with Franz Inc, which I am, right now, inclined to terminate, but I will
calm down and consider a _compromise_ because there are things Franz Inc
does very well that I want both myself and my clients to benefit from.
In the spirit of your disdain for compromise, however, I am not going to
compromise on your position. If Allegro CL is to be seen as a viable
implementation of Common Lisp, as defined by the community you hate in
the standards document you hate, Franz Inc will have to do some serious
damage control measures to convince people that you had no opportunity to
break anything people will rely on in production systems.
I do not understand what this is _really_ about, but if you really wish
to self-destruct, please be _decent_ enough to do it away from people.
If anyone else had so many personal issues with the standard as you do, I
would have urged them to leave and find something else to do. I quit
working with SGML over less than you seem to cling to in Common Lisp.
And I hope for your personal sanity that you can afford your laughter.
///
|
