Re: <insert trollish c.l.l subject here>

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Re: <insert trollish c.l.l subject here>

Posted on 2006-01-30 in Lisp

A current comp.lang.lisp thread reminded me of a c.l.l classic by Dan Barlow from a couple of years ago.

[...] no matter how much time, effort, work or money is plunged into free software (in fairness, this is unlikely to be unique to Lisp) the response from this "new user" market is always going to be "Sucks. Is there even any desire on anyone's part to improve the situation?". Anything you did more than three weeks ago when they started looking at lisp is taken for granted, assumed to be provided by some capricious god in Days of Old and now just part of the natural state of things. [...]

(I'm not posting this to c.l.l, since the thread in question deserves a quick and silent death.)

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Comments

By Just a Human on 2006-01-30

If you are posting this to your blog instead of letting it play out on usenet without your intervention, it means that you are sensitive to the subject. Are you sensitive because there is some truth in the original post?

Why don't you guys create a FAQ that covers all the "trollish" stuff and just point the newbies to it?

By Juho Snellman on 2006-01-30

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "sensitive", but I'm pretty sure you're wrong. I don't feel there's any truth in the troll's central thesis of no technological or social change in Lisp for five years. Nor do I care about the subject of this thread more than I care about the dozen other threads that run off the rails on c.l.l in the average month.

I posted about this one since Dan's article is an excellent rant (well worth reading or re-reading) and because it happens to fit this thread so well. I hope some of my audience will appreciate that. The thread will play out on usenet regardless.

By Bystander on 2006-01-30

The way it reads to me is that c.l.l participants are very, very touchy.

By Juho Snellman on 2006-01-30

You won't find me defending the c.l.l regulars posting to that thread. It takes two to tango, and all that.

By big old nobody on 2006-02-08

I just got up and running with SBCL and SLIME and asdf and the libraries I need to a working state (cl-sql, primarily) on Debian Linux in a combined 3-4 hours' worth of work, with help from docs, Google, and #lisp on Freenode. It was no harder than getting a Python or Ruby or Java or Guile installation running with the same number and kind of libraries. This is just what it takes to get a language environment running, especially on Open Source.

Granted, I'd already over the past few years gotten Java, Python, etc running and playing nicely with my emacs setup, so I'm familiar with the drill. And I'd worked with Guile and Skij and Jscheme before, so I wasn't a total newcomer to lisp.

It's just not that hard, compared to the competition at least.

The SBCL/SLIME environment is by far the best I've seen. I still dislike CL syntax-- a lot-- and would much rather read code in Python or Scheme syntax (in that order), but I have to say the CL folks have got it together.

I love how CL will PAUSE on error or exception-- not explode into a million peices like every other language does-- and let me fix what is broken and then continue exactly where I left off. That's huge.

I'm looking forward to hacking quite a bit in SBCL/SLIME.

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