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This was a good article and I enjoyed reading it, but I have to say I disagree with the central premise. I love the "family of languages" aspect of Lisp and th

This was a good article and I enjoyed reading it, but I have to say I disagree with the central premise. I love the "family of languages" aspect of Lisp and the incredible amount of innovation that is going on with Lisps and functional programming. Lisp has become like Jedi training, you aren't a real Lisp geek until you have built your own light saber (aka rolled your own Lisp dialect). The story should be to tell new people that part of using Lisp embracing this richness. There are implementations that can get people started in a hurry and anyone with ten minutes and access to a search engine can find them. I used to post and even answer some questions on comp.lang.lisp and I honestly cannot understand where it got the reputation that it seems to have. I can't tell you how many incredibly helpful messages I received from people correcting some of my misconceptions about macros and even helping me track down a type in one of the books I was learning from. The regular posters there really just had a few simple rules that were not hard to live by, e.g. don't ask the group to do your homework, try and make some effort on a problem before asking for help, don't continually make inflammatory claims about why Language X or Feature Y are so much better when you have only been using the language for three days.

pchristensen 19y ago
Yeah, I agree with your points. In the article, I was trying to summarize the impression that is conveyed by reading what people have written about Lisp. I actually had the Jedi analogy in a draft but took it out for length - small in number, deceptively powerful, greater than several people armed with clumsier weapons, etc. As for c.l.l, I've read enough people express trepidation to go there. I think it's mostly the tongue-in-cheek fear that CS students have of compiler class. Also, I don't doubt that most posters are courteous and helpful, but the anecdote about the noob who asked a dumb question and got a script to format his hard drive traveled pretty far. The 1% of people with bad experiences are just a lot more vocal than the rest with acceptable or positive experiences. I think that if there was an easier setup and more thorough online documentation, fewer people would go to c.l.l for help.
- gruseom 19y ago
  the anecdote about the noob who asked a dumb question and got a script to format his hard drive traveled pretty far The exact same complaints about the Lisp community were being repeated just as much before that incident as after it. I remember reading that hard-drive post the day it came out and thinking, this is really going to please a lot of people - now they'll have something canonical to point to.

pchristensen 19y ago

Yeah, I agree with your points. In the article, I was trying to summarize the impression that is conveyed by reading what people have written about Lisp. I actually had the Jedi analogy in a draft but took it out for length - small in number, deceptively powerful, greater than several people armed with clumsier weapons, etc. As for c.l.l, I've read enough people express trepidation to go there. I think it's mostly the tongue-in-cheek fear that CS students have of compiler class. Also, I don't doubt that most posters are courteous and helpful, but the anecdote about the noob who asked a dumb question and got a script to format his hard drive traveled pretty far. The 1% of people with bad experiences are just a lot more vocal than the rest with acceptable or positive experiences. I think that if there was an easier setup and more thorough online documentation, fewer people would go to c.l.l for help.

gruseom 19y ago
the anecdote about the noob who asked a dumb question and got a script to format his hard drive traveled pretty far The exact same complaints about the Lisp community were being repeated just as much before that incident as after it. I remember reading that hard-drive post the day it came out and thinking, this is really going to please a lot of people - now they'll have something canonical to point to.