6 ms·

He's responding to Xah Lee, well known to be one of the most abrasive and unpleasant people in the lisp community. The hostility might not be desired but it wa

He's responding to Xah Lee, well known to be one of the most abrasive and unpleasant people in the lisp community. The hostility might not be desired but it was certainly earned.

QuesnayJr 2y ago
It was Erik Naggum replying to Xah Lee, so you had two of the most abrasive and unpleasant people in the lisp community interacting.
dokyun 2y ago
It doesn't look like Xah was really trolling here, most of his responses are pretty polite. And he seems to indicate at this point in time he wasn't really familiar with lisp, so I'd venture to guess he wasn't nearly as prominent as he later became.
- p_l 2y ago
  Xah has talent for speaking out of his ass in polite and knowledgeable sounding way
  - exe34 2y ago
    the original LLM
  - Jach 2y ago
    Most of the stuff I've seen has not been so polite, he's such a notorious hater. Still, it can be entertaining in a way, in small doses (I imagine I'd feel a bit different if I was forced to share a newsgroup commons for years), and such a critic can provide a good perspective once in a while. Even though he's still around I think of him as a character as much as Naggum was, even if they were very different in important ways. The world is richer from having more characters. The other day I ran into a "gem" from Xah that just made me laugh at its expression. Willing to tank the karma/flag to reproduce: ① I fucking hate this motherfucking tech geeking hacker fucks who leave dead links on the web and don't fucking care. What the fuck? Aren't these elite, elegant, coding experts who always take perfection in algorithm, code, style, language, etc? I don't understand, how could they, have their home page dead? I laughed again when some followup links to his site 404'd. It's not at all a fair attack, but man, sometimes I really hate dead links too...
    - dokyun 2y ago
      I think he's hilarious, and at a time where a lot of programming pundits only pretend to be subversive and shameless, I welcome Xah's unflitered presentation of his opinions. He often makes a lot of good points, and I tend to find his stances on things thought-provoking even if I disagree with him.
  - NikkiA 2y ago
    He's my least favourite emacs user
- stackghost 2y ago
  You may be correct; I generally enjoy not thinking about Xah Lee so I might not have the correct context for TFA's point in time
_19qg 2y ago
Xah Lee wasn't a part of the Lisp community. He was a Usenet troll, active in several programming related newsgroups, not just comp.lang.lisp. He had never written a line of Lisp (or anything more challenging) and never contributed anything, during his Usenet times. His effect on these newsgroups was extremely negative. Discussing with him was useless. Erik Naggum tried and failed (as others did). Erik was a part of the Lisp community, but unfortunately also with negative behavior, especially on comp.lang.lisp. He could write long&useful explanations, but discussions with him were often not pleasant.
- dartharva 2y ago
  He has reacted to this post: https://x.com/xah_lee/status/1843925600026931612 https://x.com/xah_lee/status/1843925600026931612 .. and to you: https://x.com/xah_lee/status/1843918473040408690 https://x.com/xah_lee/status/1843918473040408690 https://x.com/xah_lee/status/1843918922095177969 https://x.com/xah_lee/status/1843918922095177969
  - kragen 2y ago
    Thank you for posting this! Those pages usually just say "Something went wrong. Try reloading." After several reloads, I was able to see that the second one said, "lol, this [redacted] lispm [redacted] is badmouthing me again," the third one was basically a link to http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/hackernews_lispm.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/hackernews_lispm.html, and the first one was a repost of some of the (extremely abrasive and unpleasant) text on that page.† On his page about Naggum, which is linked from the above, he writes: > During 1998 to 2004 when i read comp.lang.lisp mostly of his posts, i also post maybe a couple a month on average. Most of my posts are trolls (of the good sort (see: Netiquette Anthropology.)), and part of it is riding his name, criticizing or making fun of his attackers, and criticizing or lampoon him too. They are mostly not technical. Most are writing exercises too. This does clearly demonstrate that the characterization in this thread of Xah Lee as abrasive, unpleasant, and a Usenet troll is correct. However, it also appears that lispm's characterization of Xah as never having written a line of Lisp hasn't been correct for many years. Considering only public code, I think http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/ergonomic_emacs_keybinding.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/ergonomic_emacs_keybinding.ht... alone is a larger contribution than Naggum made in his entire life. Naggum's contribution seems to be a bit under 800 lines of Emacs Lisp which is still in current Emacs but basically unused. It's a little unclear, though, because http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/ergonomic_keybinding_qwerty_4.3.13.el http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/ergonomic_keybinding_qwerty_4... is a little under 600 lines, and I'm not sure how much Xah wrote of the several thousand lines of ergoemacs after that point. But he's also written several smaller things like http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/xah-get-thing.el http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/xah-get-thing.el (259 LoC), http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/elisp_replace_string_region.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/elisp_replace_string_region.h... (97 LoC), etc., under the GNU GPL v2. Of course line counts measure effort (the cost) rather than any measure of actual user benefit. But I think we can fairly say that Xah has by now put more effort into writing code for the Lisp community than Naggum did in his lifetime. In http://xahlee.info/comp/blog_past_2011-01.html http://xahlee.info/comp/blog_past_2011-01.html he explains that he basically never contributed anything until 02006, eight years after the thread we're discussing. However, most of the Lisp code he's written is only available by donation and presumably proprietary; for example, http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/xah-html-mode.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/xah-html-mode.html and http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/xah-go-mode.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/xah-go-mode.html. In other cases, such as http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_extend_selection.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_extend_selection.html, http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_navigating_keys_for_brackets.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_navigating_keys_for_bra..., and in general everything I've looked at under http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/xah_emacs_commands_index.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/xah_emacs_commands_index.html, the code is publicly available but unfortunately doesn't have a clear license, something I've often been guilty of myself. ______ † Personal conflicts between lispm and Xah go back many years. http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/scheme_fail.html http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/scheme_fail.html is one of numerous places where Xah personally attacked lispm, in this case because of a factual disagreement about the historical dynamics of programming language adoption.

He's responding to Xah Lee, well known to be one of the most abrasive and unpleasant people in the lisp community. The hostility might not be desired but it was certainly earned.

QuesnayJr 2y ago

It was Erik Naggum replying to Xah Lee, so you had two of the most abrasive and unpleasant people in the lisp community interacting.

dokyun 2y ago

It doesn't look like Xah was really trolling here, most of his responses are pretty polite. And he seems to indicate at this point in time he wasn't really familiar with lisp, so I'd venture to guess he wasn't nearly as prominent as he later became.

p_l 2y ago
Xah has talent for speaking out of his ass in polite and knowledgeable sounding way
- exe34 2y ago
  the original LLM
- Jach 2y ago
  Most of the stuff I've seen has not been so polite, he's such a notorious hater. Still, it can be entertaining in a way, in small doses (I imagine I'd feel a bit different if I was forced to share a newsgroup commons for years), and such a critic can provide a good perspective once in a while. Even though he's still around I think of him as a character as much as Naggum was, even if they were very different in important ways. The world is richer from having more characters. The other day I ran into a "gem" from Xah that just made me laugh at its expression. Willing to tank the karma/flag to reproduce: ① I fucking hate this motherfucking tech geeking hacker fucks who leave dead links on the web and don't fucking care. What the fuck? Aren't these elite, elegant, coding experts who always take perfection in algorithm, code, style, language, etc? I don't understand, how could they, have their home page dead? I laughed again when some followup links to his site 404'd. It's not at all a fair attack, but man, sometimes I really hate dead links too...
  - dokyun 2y ago
    I think he's hilarious, and at a time where a lot of programming pundits only pretend to be subversive and shameless, I welcome Xah's unflitered presentation of his opinions. He often makes a lot of good points, and I tend to find his stances on things thought-provoking even if I disagree with him.
- NikkiA 2y ago
  He's my least favourite emacs user
stackghost 2y ago
You may be correct; I generally enjoy not thinking about Xah Lee so I might not have the correct context for TFA's point in time

_19qg 2y ago

Xah Lee wasn't a part of the Lisp community. He was a Usenet troll, active in several programming related newsgroups, not just comp.lang.lisp. He had never written a line of Lisp (or anything more challenging) and never contributed anything, during his Usenet times. His effect on these newsgroups was extremely negative. Discussing with him was useless. Erik Naggum tried and failed (as others did). Erik was a part of the Lisp community, but unfortunately also with negative behavior, especially on comp.lang.lisp. He could write long&useful explanations, but discussions with him were often not pleasant.

dartharva 2y ago
He has reacted to this post: https://x.com/xah_lee/status/1843925600026931612 https://x.com/xah_lee/status/1843925600026931612 .. and to you: https://x.com/xah_lee/status/1843918473040408690 https://x.com/xah_lee/status/1843918473040408690 https://x.com/xah_lee/status/1843918922095177969 https://x.com/xah_lee/status/1843918922095177969
- kragen 2y ago
  Thank you for posting this! Those pages usually just say "Something went wrong. Try reloading." After several reloads, I was able to see that the second one said, "lol, this [redacted] lispm [redacted] is badmouthing me again," the third one was basically a link to http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/hackernews_lispm.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/hackernews_lispm.html, and the first one was a repost of some of the (extremely abrasive and unpleasant) text on that page.† On his page about Naggum, which is linked from the above, he writes: > During 1998 to 2004 when i read comp.lang.lisp mostly of his posts, i also post maybe a couple a month on average. Most of my posts are trolls (of the good sort (see: Netiquette Anthropology.)), and part of it is riding his name, criticizing or making fun of his attackers, and criticizing or lampoon him too. They are mostly not technical. Most are writing exercises too. This does clearly demonstrate that the characterization in this thread of Xah Lee as abrasive, unpleasant, and a Usenet troll is correct. However, it also appears that lispm's characterization of Xah as never having written a line of Lisp hasn't been correct for many years. Considering only public code, I think http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/ergonomic_emacs_keybinding.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/ergonomic_emacs_keybinding.ht... alone is a larger contribution than Naggum made in his entire life. Naggum's contribution seems to be a bit under 800 lines of Emacs Lisp which is still in current Emacs but basically unused. It's a little unclear, though, because http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/ergonomic_keybinding_qwerty_4.3.13.el http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/ergonomic_keybinding_qwerty_4... is a little under 600 lines, and I'm not sure how much Xah wrote of the several thousand lines of ergoemacs after that point. But he's also written several smaller things like http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/xah-get-thing.el http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/xah-get-thing.el (259 LoC), http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/elisp_replace_string_region.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/elisp_replace_string_region.h... (97 LoC), etc., under the GNU GPL v2. Of course line counts measure effort (the cost) rather than any measure of actual user benefit. But I think we can fairly say that Xah has by now put more effort into writing code for the Lisp community than Naggum did in his lifetime. In http://xahlee.info/comp/blog_past_2011-01.html http://xahlee.info/comp/blog_past_2011-01.html he explains that he basically never contributed anything until 02006, eight years after the thread we're discussing. However, most of the Lisp code he's written is only available by donation and presumably proprietary; for example, http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/xah-html-mode.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/xah-html-mode.html and http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/xah-go-mode.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/xah-go-mode.html. In other cases, such as http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_extend_selection.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_extend_selection.html, http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_navigating_keys_for_brackets.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_navigating_keys_for_bra..., and in general everything I've looked at under http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/xah_emacs_commands_index.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/xah_emacs_commands_index.html, the code is publicly available but unfortunately doesn't have a clear license, something I've often been guilty of myself. ______ † Personal conflicts between lispm and Xah go back many years. http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/scheme_fail.html http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/scheme_fail.html is one of numerous places where Xah personally attacked lispm, in this case because of a factual disagreement about the historical dynamics of programming language adoption.