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I think we see more posts about Lisp community drama than we see posts about people actually doing things with Lisp.

alyssaphacker 8y ago
YES! I created an account after a year of lurking just to affirm your post.
bjoli 8y ago
The lisp community has a nice history about not being a very welcoming place, with a lot of people looking up to the nice attitude of people like Erik Naggum. Things have gotten a lot better though.
- lispm 8y ago
  Erik Naggum was not 'the Lisp community', though there were some people worshipping him on comp.lang.lisp - both from inside Lisp and outside. comp.lang.lisp was a popular forum, but not THE Lisp community. I always thought that his online behavior was kind of an ugly personality disorder.
  - bjoli 8y ago
    I know. I should ha en put it more eloquently. But as you said, there were some people that idolised him. I found that for a long time people trying to learn lisp were confronted with really bad attitude from a loud minority. It really didn't really make people feel welcome. I am but a visitor in lisp land (I work in CL a couple of times a year), and things have become noticeably nicer since 2010.
MrEldritch 8y ago
I think that's because there's just actually more new Lisp community drama than there is actual Lisp programming.
fulafel 8y ago
Except for the the Clojure branch of the family tree. Eg: there was this vaguely clojurey statically typed non-GC language, being targeted for games, presented at a recent Clojure conf: https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp
- Semiapies 8y ago
  Ayup. I don't really see many Clojure drama posts, here.
phoe-krk 8y ago
Honestly, I can't do anything but put blame for this on people like Paul Graham. Some people come to Lisp and expect to discover a magic wand to abolish all blub languages that was prophecised by the legendary almighty Lisp Prophet, and they rush out to seek it. Then they realize that Lisp is just another programming language equivalent to all others by means of Turing completeness, with particular features, strengths and weaknesses they feel cheated and disenchanted, and go wing our their frustrations by means of articles like that. Which is directly why articles like Baggers' happen. The question is: why do people actually consider Lisp to be the Holy Grail By Which All ALGOL-Like Languages Must/Shall/Will Die? And the answer that instantly comes to my mind is all the unfair PR people like Graham give it. Calling Lisp a magical all-fixing wand is all fun and games until someone actually believes in it (who wouldn't believe The Y-Combinator Guy? after all), and then discovers that the reality doesn't really look that straightforward, and writing Lisp doesn't suddenly mean that you get to do less work than you'd otherwise do. As pointed out in Shinmera's response, https://reader.tymoon.eu/article/370 https://reader.tymoon.eu/article/370 : I believe Lisp allows me to be quicker about developing these tools than other languages, but making an actual game would be even quicker if I didn't have to make most of these tools in the first place.

YES! I created an account after a year of lurking just to affirm your post.

The lisp community has a nice history about not being a very welcoming place, with a lot of people looking up to the nice attitude of people like Erik Naggum. Things have gotten a lot better though.

lispm 8y ago
Erik Naggum was not 'the Lisp community', though there were some people worshipping him on comp.lang.lisp - both from inside Lisp and outside. comp.lang.lisp was a popular forum, but not THE Lisp community. I always thought that his online behavior was kind of an ugly personality disorder.
- bjoli 8y ago
  I know. I should ha en put it more eloquently. But as you said, there were some people that idolised him. I found that for a long time people trying to learn lisp were confronted with really bad attitude from a loud minority. It really didn't really make people feel welcome. I am but a visitor in lisp land (I work in CL a couple of times a year), and things have become noticeably nicer since 2010.

MrEldritch 8y ago

I think that's because there's just actually more new Lisp community drama than there is actual Lisp programming.

fulafel 8y ago

Except for the the Clojure branch of the family tree. Eg: there was this vaguely clojurey statically typed non-GC language, being targeted for games, presented at a recent Clojure conf: https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp

Semiapies 8y ago
Ayup. I don't really see many Clojure drama posts, here.

phoe-krk 8y ago

Honestly, I can't do anything but put blame for this on people like Paul Graham. Some people come to Lisp and expect to discover a magic wand to abolish all blub languages that was prophecised by the legendary almighty Lisp Prophet, and they rush out to seek it. Then they realize that Lisp is just another programming language equivalent to all others by means of Turing completeness, with particular features, strengths and weaknesses they feel cheated and disenchanted, and go wing our their frustrations by means of articles like that. Which is directly why articles like Baggers' happen. The question is: why do people actually consider Lisp to be the Holy Grail By Which All ALGOL-Like Languages Must/Shall/Will Die? And the answer that instantly comes to my mind is all the unfair PR people like Graham give it. Calling Lisp a magical all-fixing wand is all fun and games until someone actually believes in it (who wouldn't believe The Y-Combinator Guy? after all), and then discovers that the reality doesn't really look that straightforward, and writing Lisp doesn't suddenly mean that you get to do less work than you'd otherwise do. As pointed out in Shinmera's response, https://reader.tymoon.eu/article/370 https://reader.tymoon.eu/article/370 : I believe Lisp allows me to be quicker about developing these tools than other languages, but making an actual game would be even quicker if I didn't have to make most of these tools in the first place.