3 ms·

The foundations of the computing systems we use are built of ossified crud, and this is a genuine crime against the human mind. This guy has no good words for

The foundations of the computing systems we use are built of ossified crud, and this is a genuine crime against the human mind. This guy has no good words for anything that anyone actually uses. Check out his other posts. He attacks Clojure (it makes him "sick") and only praises is Lisp in its purest incarnations and his own embryonic Loper OS. I think it's clear that one of the fundamental principles driving successful open-source software is a healthy respect for the real and the possible, as well as a drive to solve real problems within a realistic timeframe. If everything about using computers these days "sucks" and you insist on attacking those, like Rich Hickey of Clojure fame, who put in hard work to make it better, what's the point of being a hacker? It's a bit sad.

asciilifeform 17y ago
> This guy has no good words for anything that anyone actually uses. The Symbolics Lisp Machines had thousands of known installations. There are still active users. Myself, for instance. Other enthusiasts. Certain U.S. Army facilities, as well. > a healthy respect for the real and the possible You don't get to declare that a non-braindead OS and machine architecture are unreal and impossible just because politicians defunded Symbolics (the company's weakness was mainly choosing to live entirely off the Cold War pig trough.) What was built once could be built again. > Rich Hickey of Clojure fame, who put in hard work to make it better I have nothing against Hickey as a person. How he chooses to spend his time is no business of mine. Yet I have no reason to thank him. He has created nothing of value to me. I am not attached to Lisp per se; rather, I am drawn to systems capable of total reflection and introspection. Clojure offers neither. It disgusts me because it has sold so many on the illusion that it has somehow rescued the most worthwhile innovations of the Lisp world; on the contrary, it is consigning them to oblivion ever more thoroughly, by feeding the widespread misconception that anything which does not fit snugly into today's broken environments is simply no great loss and ought not to be missed: "We owe it to the losers in these little skirmishes to make sure that, if nothing else, the good ideas are not lost along with the framework. And we do not accomplish that by defining that there was nothing lost. That's both callous to those who worked hard on these other things and short-sighted to the future, which might one day care about the things that got lost." http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b2c0190dc30c3e5f?hl=en http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b2c0190dc3...
- MaysonL 17y ago
  Have you checked out Newspeak?

asciilifeform 17y ago

> This guy has no good words for anything that anyone actually uses. The Symbolics Lisp Machines had thousands of known installations. There are still active users. Myself, for instance. Other enthusiasts. Certain U.S. Army facilities, as well. > a healthy respect for the real and the possible You don't get to declare that a non-braindead OS and machine architecture are unreal and impossible just because politicians defunded Symbolics (the company's weakness was mainly choosing to live entirely off the Cold War pig trough.) What was built once could be built again. > Rich Hickey of Clojure fame, who put in hard work to make it better I have nothing against Hickey as a person. How he chooses to spend his time is no business of mine. Yet I have no reason to thank him. He has created nothing of value to me. I am not attached to Lisp per se; rather, I am drawn to systems capable of total reflection and introspection. Clojure offers neither. It disgusts me because it has sold so many on the illusion that it has somehow rescued the most worthwhile innovations of the Lisp world; on the contrary, it is consigning them to oblivion ever more thoroughly, by feeding the widespread misconception that anything which does not fit snugly into today's broken environments is simply no great loss and ought not to be missed: "We owe it to the losers in these little skirmishes to make sure that, if nothing else, the good ideas are not lost along with the framework. And we do not accomplish that by defining that there was nothing lost. That's both callous to those who worked hard on these other things and short-sighted to the future, which might one day care about the things that got lost." http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b2c0190dc30c3e5f?hl=en http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b2c0190dc3...

MaysonL 17y ago
Have you checked out Newspeak?