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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 n

by 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.
- lispm 2y ago
  You are, sadly, digging yourself deeper into a hole. I'm not interested to follow you there.
  - kragen 2y ago
    None of this has to do with me; I can't have posted to comp.lang.lisp more than a few times, and I don't recall ever interacting with Naggum. Most of what I've said is self-evidently correct, and almost all of the rest is relatively easy to verify by reading the archives of old mailing lists and Usenet. The only exception is my insinuation that Stallman was tempted to bomb the Symbolics offices, which I don't have a reliable source for; maybe you could find out by asking Stallman, or Stallman's former friends and former coworkers.
    - lispm 2y ago
      "self-evidently correct" is not a good word if you want to discuss things with people who were actually active in the wider Lisp communities, including comp.lang.lisp, other newsgroups, various mailing lists, Lisp conferences, etc.
      - kragen 2y ago
        I'm interested to hear your alternative perspective, but as long as I lack it, I'm going to have to agree with dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26855767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26855767 My objective here is not to attack you for your partisan support of Naggum; rather, I want to understand what alternative perspective you're coming from in which my observations perhaps aren't self-evidently correct—though I note that you've carefully avoided actually saying they aren't, leaving open the interpretation that it's just that you wish I'd phrase it differently.
        lispm 2y ago
        > My objective here is not to attack you for your partisan support of Naggum Look, I'm not supporting Naggum. From the actual Lisp users I've met in real life, few were reading comp.lang.lisp, almost none was posting there. Very few would even know who the people there were. The actual people in the Lisp community I admire are many - I could list 100 - they had a much greater impact on what was happening. Most of them never used comp.lang.lisp . Among women the participation rate was near zero! Most of the interesting communication was in specific communities over mailing lists. I fondly remember SLUG (the Symbolics Lisp Users Group), the MCL mailing list, and several others. comp.lang.lisp had the most negative impact by trolls, like the one Naggum was answering, which caused endless bullshit discussions and which had very destructive behavior. We never found a way to deal with that. What it killed in the end was that the time for Usenet was over, Google groups, spam, it was mostly irrelevant and a much more toxic Internet took over. See 4chan, various Reddit groups (though the Lisp subreddits at Reddit do better) and X for much worse communication systems. Plus Lisp was in a general demise in the 90s. Not the Usenet caused the demise of Lisp, but the demise of Lisp was causing a general lack of interest. Cause and effect were different of what you claim. For you the contact to Lisp could be mostly net related (?). When I was learning at the university roughly up to 20 professors were in some way or another involved in Lisp projects. There were people I've seen in real life, often daily. There were many people with deep Lisp knowledge (and this was not even the US). You can bet that none of them used or cared about comp.lang.lisp. Same for the people in the projects and the students. What you think was "the Lisp community", was just a popular online community of mostly random people, with less impact on what actually happened in the Lisp communities, then you believe.

by lispm 2y ago

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.

lispm 2y ago
You are, sadly, digging yourself deeper into a hole. I'm not interested to follow you there.
- kragen 2y ago
  None of this has to do with me; I can't have posted to comp.lang.lisp more than a few times, and I don't recall ever interacting with Naggum. Most of what I've said is self-evidently correct, and almost all of the rest is relatively easy to verify by reading the archives of old mailing lists and Usenet. The only exception is my insinuation that Stallman was tempted to bomb the Symbolics offices, which I don't have a reliable source for; maybe you could find out by asking Stallman, or Stallman's former friends and former coworkers.
  - lispm 2y ago
    "self-evidently correct" is not a good word if you want to discuss things with people who were actually active in the wider Lisp communities, including comp.lang.lisp, other newsgroups, various mailing lists, Lisp conferences, etc.
    - kragen 2y ago
      I'm interested to hear your alternative perspective, but as long as I lack it, I'm going to have to agree with dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26855767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26855767 My objective here is not to attack you for your partisan support of Naggum; rather, I want to understand what alternative perspective you're coming from in which my observations perhaps aren't self-evidently correct—though I note that you've carefully avoided actually saying they aren't, leaving open the interpretation that it's just that you wish I'd phrase it differently.
      - lispm 2y ago
        > My objective here is not to attack you for your partisan support of Naggum Look, I'm not supporting Naggum. From the actual Lisp users I've met in real life, few were reading comp.lang.lisp, almost none was posting there. Very few would even know who the people there were. The actual people in the Lisp community I admire are many - I could list 100 - they had a much greater impact on what was happening. Most of them never used comp.lang.lisp . Among women the participation rate was near zero! Most of the interesting communication was in specific communities over mailing lists. I fondly remember SLUG (the Symbolics Lisp Users Group), the MCL mailing list, and several others. comp.lang.lisp had the most negative impact by trolls, like the one Naggum was answering, which caused endless bullshit discussions and which had very destructive behavior. We never found a way to deal with that. What it killed in the end was that the time for Usenet was over, Google groups, spam, it was mostly irrelevant and a much more toxic Internet took over. See 4chan, various Reddit groups (though the Lisp subreddits at Reddit do better) and X for much worse communication systems. Plus Lisp was in a general demise in the 90s. Not the Usenet caused the demise of Lisp, but the demise of Lisp was causing a general lack of interest. Cause and effect were different of what you claim. For you the contact to Lisp could be mostly net related (?). When I was learning at the university roughly up to 20 professors were in some way or another involved in Lisp projects. There were people I've seen in real life, often daily. There were many people with deep Lisp knowledge (and this was not even the US). You can bet that none of them used or cared about comp.lang.lisp. Same for the people in the projects and the students. What you think was "the Lisp community", was just a popular online community of mostly random people, with less impact on what actually happened in the Lisp communities, then you believe.