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That was Naggum's trademark: Extremely good explanations coupled with zero tolerance for fools. As long as you asked him a question in good faith, he treated yo

That was Naggum's trademark: Extremely good explanations coupled with zero tolerance for fools. As long as you asked him a question in good faith, he treated you with courtesy. But I confess I relished the entertainment of reading his deconstructions of bad-faith actors. Naggum died much too young. I hope he has found peace. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum

eadmund 2y ago
I think the issue is distinguishing between bad faith and simple ignorance. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar!
- kazinator 2y ago
  Fruit vinegar (e.g. apple cider) is the tool of choice for trapping fruit flies.
moron4hire 2y ago
I can't stand this style of writing. I especially dislike it when I catch myself doing it. It's not necessarily because of the negativity. It's mostly just because people who write like this take forever to get to their point.
- kazinator 2y ago
  A certain Tim R., a present day comp.lang.c poster, takes multiple posts spanning weeks to get to the point.
  - moron4hire 2y ago
    And these people always say they're "just being direct". It's a good litmus test for me in my own writing. Am I actually being direct or just indulging in anger? What happens if I just get to the point and say what I want? I have found I get more of what I want that way.
e40 2y ago
It’s been a while since I’ve seen those photos on the wikipedia page, which I took. He was very photogenic. He came to Berkeley for a Lisp conference. Brings back some really good memories. Thanks.
- dreamcompiler 2y ago
  I met him (and McCarthy too) at that conference. Can't believe it's been 25 years.
kragen 2y ago
Naggum destroyed the Lisp community by driving away everyone who didn't relish it. (Like you, Xah Lee did relish it, even when the bad-faith actor being "deconstructed" was a character he was playing—perhaps especially then!) He also had, as you can see in this post, zero tolerance for people preferring different tradeoffs from his own (often because they held different values), which fragmented it.
- kazinator 2y ago
  comp.lang.lisp is not the same thing as "the Lisp community". Even in the heyday, the Usenet news groups represented a minority. For any language, OS or tech stack, there were many more programmers off Usenet than on. A programming language newsgroup represents the intersection between interest in that language and interest in Usenet.
- lispm 2y ago
  German has this great word for your comment: "unterkomplex". The English "simplistic" might come near. comp.lang.lisp was not "the Lisp community", Naggum did not single handedly destroy it, you ignore the other participants, the general Usenet dynamics and its overall fate...
  - kragen 2y ago
    Usenet was important for the development of many other language communities, and Lisp was denied that opportunity. Naggum didn't act alone, certainly, and bad blood existed in the Lisp community since before Usenet (Stallman is a difficult person, and we can all be grateful he never actually bombed the Symbolics offices), but he was the pivotal figure in how things played out in the late 01990s. There wasn't a Naggum-free alternative general Lisp venue where new users (or Lispers who merely disagreed with Naggum, such as Schemers) could post without fear of public humiliation, so mostly they didn't. It's a rare undergraduate who doesn't count public humiliation among their worst fears, and for people like Steele, Weinreb, Gabriel, Friedman, and Stallman, participation on Usenet was all downside with no upside. Lisp started to recover immediately when Naggum died. Or, more accurately, when he got too sick to post. I could make the same criticism of HN, but to a much smaller degree. Kaz is of course correct that in Lisp, as in any language, there's a silent majority of programmers who don't post in public forums like Usenet. But they depend on the efforts of those who do for things like FAQs and free software.

eadmund 2y ago

I think the issue is distinguishing between bad faith and simple ignorance. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar!

kazinator 2y ago
Fruit vinegar (e.g. apple cider) is the tool of choice for trapping fruit flies.

moron4hire 2y ago

I can't stand this style of writing. I especially dislike it when I catch myself doing it. It's not necessarily because of the negativity. It's mostly just because people who write like this take forever to get to their point.

kazinator 2y ago
A certain Tim R., a present day comp.lang.c poster, takes multiple posts spanning weeks to get to the point.
- moron4hire 2y ago
  And these people always say they're "just being direct". It's a good litmus test for me in my own writing. Am I actually being direct or just indulging in anger? What happens if I just get to the point and say what I want? I have found I get more of what I want that way.

e40 2y ago

It’s been a while since I’ve seen those photos on the wikipedia page, which I took. He was very photogenic. He came to Berkeley for a Lisp conference. Brings back some really good memories. Thanks.

dreamcompiler 2y ago
I met him (and McCarthy too) at that conference. Can't believe it's been 25 years.

kragen 2y ago

Naggum destroyed the Lisp community by driving away everyone who didn't relish it. (Like you, Xah Lee did relish it, even when the bad-faith actor being "deconstructed" was a character he was playing—perhaps especially then!) He also had, as you can see in this post, zero tolerance for people preferring different tradeoffs from his own (often because they held different values), which fragmented it.

kazinator 2y ago
comp.lang.lisp is not the same thing as "the Lisp community". Even in the heyday, the Usenet news groups represented a minority. For any language, OS or tech stack, there were many more programmers off Usenet than on. A programming language newsgroup represents the intersection between interest in that language and interest in Usenet.
lispm 2y ago
German has this great word for your comment: "unterkomplex". The English "simplistic" might come near. comp.lang.lisp was not "the Lisp community", Naggum did not single handedly destroy it, you ignore the other participants, the general Usenet dynamics and its overall fate...
- kragen 2y ago
  Usenet was important for the development of many other language communities, and Lisp was denied that opportunity. Naggum didn't act alone, certainly, and bad blood existed in the Lisp community since before Usenet (Stallman is a difficult person, and we can all be grateful he never actually bombed the Symbolics offices), but he was the pivotal figure in how things played out in the late 01990s. There wasn't a Naggum-free alternative general Lisp venue where new users (or Lispers who merely disagreed with Naggum, such as Schemers) could post without fear of public humiliation, so mostly they didn't. It's a rare undergraduate who doesn't count public humiliation among their worst fears, and for people like Steele, Weinreb, Gabriel, Friedman, and Stallman, participation on Usenet was all downside with no upside. Lisp started to recover immediately when Naggum died. Or, more accurately, when he got too sick to post. I could make the same criticism of HN, but to a much smaller degree. Kaz is of course correct that in Lisp, as in any language, there's a silent majority of programmers who don't post in public forums like Usenet. But they depend on the efforts of those who do for things like FAQs and free software.