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I can imagine that Lisp without the shitty attitude would be great. The shitty attitude that elegance and purity is so much more important than actually being

by bborud 15y ago

I can imagine that Lisp without the shitty attitude would be great. The shitty attitude that elegance and purity is so much more important than actually being able to talk to the environment a program runs in.

tikhonj 15y ago
Why do you think that Lisp programs can't talk to the environment? Also, even if you couldn't, flippantly dismissing "elegance and purity" as a "shitty attitude" is not very constructive.
- bborud 15y ago
  Having a shitty attitude is not constructive. Pointing out the shitty attitude may be rude and unpleasant, but people have to be realistic. The Lisp community, as I have experienced it, has a shitty attitude towards people who might have criticisms or have a more pragmatic approach. (And I am not a Ruby nut. For crying out loud, Ruby is such a sloppy, pointless direction to take things in that we might as well stick to Perl -- which for the most part was at least faster). I made a couple of attempts at getting real work done in Lisp, and Lisp derivatives in the past. What almost always ended up making life miserable for me was that doing IO in Lisp was painful. And when you write networked server software, you do care about IO. Quite a lot actually. There was no way to write performant networked servers in Common Lisp in a way that was portable across implementations. And the amount of abuse I took when I pointed out that this was a fairly severe limitation told me that I was dealing with people whose world view may not be perfectly aligned with what is needed to build a following. For all I know, there may be a perfectly portable way to do highly performant networked IO in Common Lisp today. But that is of no importance. Because what I remember of the Lisp community is that they don't like strangers and they are really big on authority and rank. But the Lisp world isn't just Common Lisp, it is things like Scheme as well. And what a load of nonsense the early Scheme days were. Again, all they cared about was the inner nuts and bolts. Actually caring for the parts of the language that INSPIRES people do use it wasn't even part of the plan. You know what: having a standard library that does useful stuff isn't raving lunacy. it is actually a quite good idea. Java may be just a gradual evolution from the transitional languages of the late 80s and early 90s, but it was the first language to have a fairly decent standard library. Python may have been clumsy and filled with warts, but you could do things with it right away. Ruby may have been a giant step back and an exercise in excessive masturbation over a single idea, but even though it was fairly crap it let people do things. Heck, even a hack like Javascript is doing well. Occasionally Lisp'ers tell me that things have gotten better. That the Lisp community has become more pragmatic. That "we get it now" and that bloated egos might even consider learning something from other communities. Well, then why isn't everyone suddenly rushing to use Lisp? Because, you know what: people are pretty open minded about languages these days. It is like 1968 of programming languages. Everyone is in bed with everyone else. So downvote me all you want. And write bitter articles about how stupid the rest of the world is. Go on, it is a great way to limit your followers to people who are just like you and to keep new ideas out.
rayiner 15y ago
Elegance and purity are the last thing Common Lisper's care about. Common Lisp is a by-committee spec, after all. If you're going to characterize the "shitty attitude" around Lisp, it's much more about the language being pragmatically well-designed. Dynamic, but not unmanageably so like Ruby. Tasteful API design unlike Java. Performance much closer to Java than to scripting languages. Etc.
- lispm 15y ago
  The original Common Lisp was more like a community work. It led to an understanding about the language in early 1983. A book about the language was then published in 1984: CLtL1. The work on the ANSI CL standard started then in 1986 using the ANSI standardization process. An intermediate language description (not a work of ANSI) was published as CLtL2. The ANSI CL standard then still took a few years more work to finalize and publish a standard document.
jacquesm 15y ago
Lisp does not have an attitude.
- bborud 15y ago
  But the Lisp community does.

by bborud 15y ago

tikhonj 15y ago

Why do you think that Lisp programs can't talk to the environment? Also, even if you couldn't, flippantly dismissing "elegance and purity" as a "shitty attitude" is not very constructive.

bborud 15y ago
Having a shitty attitude is not constructive. Pointing out the shitty attitude may be rude and unpleasant, but people have to be realistic. The Lisp community, as I have experienced it, has a shitty attitude towards people who might have criticisms or have a more pragmatic approach. (And I am not a Ruby nut. For crying out loud, Ruby is such a sloppy, pointless direction to take things in that we might as well stick to Perl -- which for the most part was at least faster). I made a couple of attempts at getting real work done in Lisp, and Lisp derivatives in the past. What almost always ended up making life miserable for me was that doing IO in Lisp was painful. And when you write networked server software, you do care about IO. Quite a lot actually. There was no way to write performant networked servers in Common Lisp in a way that was portable across implementations. And the amount of abuse I took when I pointed out that this was a fairly severe limitation told me that I was dealing with people whose world view may not be perfectly aligned with what is needed to build a following. For all I know, there may be a perfectly portable way to do highly performant networked IO in Common Lisp today. But that is of no importance. Because what I remember of the Lisp community is that they don't like strangers and they are really big on authority and rank. But the Lisp world isn't just Common Lisp, it is things like Scheme as well. And what a load of nonsense the early Scheme days were. Again, all they cared about was the inner nuts and bolts. Actually caring for the parts of the language that INSPIRES people do use it wasn't even part of the plan. You know what: having a standard library that does useful stuff isn't raving lunacy. it is actually a quite good idea. Java may be just a gradual evolution from the transitional languages of the late 80s and early 90s, but it was the first language to have a fairly decent standard library. Python may have been clumsy and filled with warts, but you could do things with it right away. Ruby may have been a giant step back and an exercise in excessive masturbation over a single idea, but even though it was fairly crap it let people do things. Heck, even a hack like Javascript is doing well. Occasionally Lisp'ers tell me that things have gotten better. That the Lisp community has become more pragmatic. That "we get it now" and that bloated egos might even consider learning something from other communities. Well, then why isn't everyone suddenly rushing to use Lisp? Because, you know what: people are pretty open minded about languages these days. It is like 1968 of programming languages. Everyone is in bed with everyone else. So downvote me all you want. And write bitter articles about how stupid the rest of the world is. Go on, it is a great way to limit your followers to people who are just like you and to keep new ideas out.

rayiner 15y ago

Elegance and purity are the last thing Common Lisper's care about. Common Lisp is a by-committee spec, after all. If you're going to characterize the "shitty attitude" around Lisp, it's much more about the language being pragmatically well-designed. Dynamic, but not unmanageably so like Ruby. Tasteful API design unlike Java. Performance much closer to Java than to scripting languages. Etc.

lispm 15y ago
The original Common Lisp was more like a community work. It led to an understanding about the language in early 1983. A book about the language was then published in 1984: CLtL1. The work on the ANSI CL standard started then in 1986 using the ANSI standardization process. An intermediate language description (not a work of ANSI) was published as CLtL2. The ANSI CL standard then still took a few years more work to finalize and publish a standard document.

jacquesm 15y ago

Lisp does not have an attitude.

bborud 15y ago
But the Lisp community does.