

Comp.lang.lisp on Clojure - parenthesis
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/thread/0d05837df1efe075

======
st3fan
Yeah ... comp.lang.lisp ... that group has turned into a huge flame fest where
actual discussions about the language are rare. Very sad.

The group is dominated by a small group of agressive and rude hardcore lisp
programmers who turn most (innocent) questions and discussions from newbies
into language flamewars and personal insults.

It is very unfortunate. When I was playing with common lisp about a year go I
got more info from the group's archives from the late 80 and early 90s than
from those folks who are there now.

~~~
icey
cll has been this way for as long as I can remember. Erik Naggum was around a
lot more back then, and he was just as bad as these guys.

[Edit: by "bad" I mean he clearly knew what he was talking about, and was
irate that people didn't always see it his way. He never did give someone some
code to delete all the files on their hard drive though.]

~~~
gruseom
An old Lisper told me his opinion that Naggum almost singlehandedly destroyed
the CL community, by being both so smart and so noxious that his behavior
became a sort of local standard.

On another note, Dan Weinreb has been actively working to create a renewed,
less dysfunctional CL community. Which reminds me that I really ought to find
a way to contribute to that.

~~~
mahmud
<http://www.lispforum.com/> should be friendlier.

All the active lispers who are producing useful software not actually writing
in cll; you're much better off finding them in the gmane mailinglists.

~~~
gruseom
Which mailinglists?

~~~
mahmud
the MLs for any of the software/projects that you need help with. For the
language itself, #lisp is both immediate and mild.

------
mahmud
Clojure _is_ a Lisp, no question about it. And an excellent one at that.

But one has to remember that Common Lisp was created under a forced consensus.
Several Lisp vendors and communities were brought under one roof and told to
amalgamate their Lisps and standardize NOW, or they couldn't do business with
the U.S. government. Many many people had to fight over what to keep and what
to leave, vendors had to give up their competitive edge, systems were broken,
and after 10 years of polishing and improvements the modern Common Lisp was
born.

Take the cover of CLtL2 and look at the list of authors. The who's who of
Lisp. If you go out there and invent a new dialect, negligently ignoring what
came before, refusing to consider an standard core + your own vendor
extensions, breaking what makes Lisp Lisp, like syntax, and even side stepping
other Free Lisps that existed the day you started and were solving the same
problem .. then don't be troubled if you're not met with a cheering crowd and
greeted as a liberator.

------
icey
This is still going on?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=490216>

~~~
10ren
Someone there claimed it becomes resolved at about message 255. I found it
tediously slow to get to that screen (BTW: is there a way to jump ahead in
google groups, or do you really have to click "next" 10 times (jumps 25 each
time)? The URL is a hashkey that doesn't have explicit parameters.)

So here's the URL for messages 251- 275:
[http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/thread/d05837df1efe075/4e0ed2ccea20c45a)

