Social Problems of Lisp

SBCL 1.0

2006-12-02T07:39:00.000-08:00

A simple announcement, and it turns into garbage. Ken Tilton gets half the blame, and everyone who responded to him gets the other half.

Gavino (bootiack@yahoo.com)

2006-11-16T08:17:00.000-08:00

OK, the other half of the c.l.l problem is the trolls who somehow manage to invoke responses to their inane postings. Gavino is the latest example. I can't see that *any* of his postings deserve a reply, but yet he can successfully bait c.l.l into creating long meandering theads. Sure, these boring threads are easy to recognize and ignore, but I don't understand why anyone would bother to reply at all. If squint, I can sort of see why someone might be suckered into responding to a sophisticated troll like Jon Harrop He's the guy who is continually trying to convert everyone to O'Caml. At least he manages to keep his posts grammatically correct and coherent, even if off-topic and annoying. He pretends that there *could* be a theoretical use for Lisp, but he hasn't seen it yet. "Lisp, the Higgs boson of the programming world". Gavino, on the other hand, fails to live up to this standard.

Your wish is my command

2006-11-06T17:34:00.000-08:00

Mr. "TheLifter" has requested that these posts be added to the roll...

Jon S. Anthony

Kaz Kylheku

Edi Weitz

...and here's a flame for "TheLifter", posting this kind of stuff over on c.l.l. is off-topic and bad form. We here at the Social-Problems-of-Lisp are trying improve the situation, not contribute to the noise. Please email further suggestions to my email address (yes, this is for real): yellow.bellied.coward@hotmail.com

Pascal Bourguignon

2006-10-16T20:19:00.000-07:00

I guess I don't understand why a person would want to publically record their social dysfunctions when they could have written a private email instead.

Ken Tilton

2006-08-30T10:36:00.000-07:00

The next runner up...

Ken Tilton

Elder Statesmen of Lisp?

2006-07-28T10:39:00.001-07:00

Why doesn't the Lisp community have any elder statesmen active in the community? Is it because Lisp predates the 'Net by so much, and all the candidates have retired/died? McCarthy could maybe have been one. There are several people who would qualify, (Steele, Norvig, Graham, etc.) but they've seeminly moved on to greener pastures. Instead we are stuck with withered, angry old men like Kent Pitman. Sigh.

Pascal Bourguignon, Come on Down!

2006-06-08T20:00:00.000-07:00

Newbie asks a simple question, and Pascal gives him a trojan to erase his hard drive. Nice.

Charter member

2006-05-17T09:44:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Kaz Kylheku, who becomes the first person to be inducted into the Social Problems of Lisp Hall-of-Shame. How was this honor earned? Well a newbie asks an innocuous question over on comp.lang.lisp about the origins of Lisp-2 vs. Lisp-1 and gets in reply...

What value is there to someone, for instance me, in persuading you of anything?

Do you stand between me and something that I want?

The information is there; make up your own mind.

Newbies who require persuasion are typically just passive-aggressive attention seekers, who come with an agenda other than the willingness to learn: namely, they just want to engage their personality against another one.

If you're finding Common Lisp namespaces inconvenient, then maybe you're just not wired for that type of language. Go program in something in which variables, type names, goto labels, exception handlers, and all other entities are entered into the same namespace.