3 ms·

As someone who has no idea about the CL community, what kind of experiences did you have, or what did you see, to give you such a negative impression?

AlexCoventry 8y ago
A decade ago, you had to have pretty thick skin to tolerate some of the regulars.
profsnuggles 8y ago
I did a quick search and found the /. post that convinced me to buy Practical Common Lisp https://news.slashdot.org/story/05/04/28/1936206/lisperati.com https://news.slashdot.org/story/05/04/28/1936206/lisperati.c... which was nostalgic. So this happened a while ago I don't really remember most of the specifics. I believe at the time I gave up I was trying to get weather information into StumpWM by querying the NWS SOAP api over https. I vaguely remember that there was no http library that supported SSL? I was told to just use the SBCL FFI to wrap libcurl, that SSL was useless anyway and I was an idiot for even wanting to use it. Maybe the community is better now, but I see comments on Clojure articles from Common Lispers sometimes and I have my doubts.
- lispm 8y ago
  Calling curl (or similar) from CL as an external program is a valid answer. I don't think that answer makes a large and diverse 'community' of thousands of people forever 'toxic'.
  - profsnuggles 8y ago
    I'm just reporting my personal experience. That wasn't the first or only poor interaction I had asking for help trying to learn. You also are not helping make the case that the Common Lisp community is fine. Your response completely ignores the actual issue which makes it feel like a passive aggressive attack. I don't know, that probably wasn't your intent. But I already stated that I had extremely poor experiences with the community so I'm not exactly primed to give the benefit of the doubt.
    - lispm 8y ago
      > You also are not helping make the case that the Common Lisp community is fine. I don't make the case. There is no single 'Common Lisp community' and I have no idea how all the various groups are doing. I know lots of great people in the Common Lisp community. It would make me sad to see them labelled as 'toxic'.

AlexCoventry 8y ago

A decade ago, you had to have pretty thick skin to tolerate some of the regulars.

profsnuggles 8y ago

I did a quick search and found the /. post that convinced me to buy Practical Common Lisp https://news.slashdot.org/story/05/04/28/1936206/lisperati.com https://news.slashdot.org/story/05/04/28/1936206/lisperati.c... which was nostalgic. So this happened a while ago I don't really remember most of the specifics. I believe at the time I gave up I was trying to get weather information into StumpWM by querying the NWS SOAP api over https. I vaguely remember that there was no http library that supported SSL? I was told to just use the SBCL FFI to wrap libcurl, that SSL was useless anyway and I was an idiot for even wanting to use it. Maybe the community is better now, but I see comments on Clojure articles from Common Lispers sometimes and I have my doubts.

lispm 8y ago
Calling curl (or similar) from CL as an external program is a valid answer. I don't think that answer makes a large and diverse 'community' of thousands of people forever 'toxic'.
- profsnuggles 8y ago
  I'm just reporting my personal experience. That wasn't the first or only poor interaction I had asking for help trying to learn. You also are not helping make the case that the Common Lisp community is fine. Your response completely ignores the actual issue which makes it feel like a passive aggressive attack. I don't know, that probably wasn't your intent. But I already stated that I had extremely poor experiences with the community so I'm not exactly primed to give the benefit of the doubt.
  - lispm 8y ago
    > You also are not helping make the case that the Common Lisp community is fine. I don't make the case. There is no single 'Common Lisp community' and I have no idea how all the various groups are doing. I know lots of great people in the Common Lisp community. It would make me sad to see them labelled as 'toxic'.