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While I don't doubt the author's claims about the CL community being unwelcoming, my admittedly anecdotical experience with it was very different: I wrote a sm

While I don't doubt the author's claims about the CL community being unwelcoming, my admittedly anecdotical experience with it was very different: I wrote a small utility library this year (cl-strings) as my first ever open source project, showed it on #lisp and r/lisp asking for feedback, and received mostly encouraging comments and very constructive criticism. I've also made some PR's to jscl as a complete newbie to the project, and felt very welcomed. Hopefully this meme about the CL community is taken with a grain of salt, it certainly is not true universally.

jwdunne 10y ago
Despite the interesting read, I had the same experience too except as a complete newbie. I tried redefining the plus operator to see how flexible the language really was (after, you know, all the talk of its power). I'd led myself into a rabbit hole with a macro. The guys in #lisp fairly and in humour told me that using eval in a macro indicates my macro is wrong. Second, I'm trying to redefine a core operator so I should read up on packages. Despite that, they guided me to get my macro working anyway to conclude my sandbox play with success. I remember being very grateful for their help and feeling like it was a community I wouldn't mind being a part of. I imagine with a dumb rookie mistake like that, I should have had my self esteem shredded to dust. Instead, I carried on dabbling and reading. I'm no CL programmer but I know more than I did that day so I wasn't put off in the slightest. EDIT: I just remembered they advised I could make my day job more interesting by writing my own way to inline CL code in PHP as a good project to up the ante.