Subject: Re: source access vs dynamism From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/09/05 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3145552505785267@naggum.no> * William Tanksley | "Wordset" would be, I believe, an equally useful term. "Library", | however, will be immediately understandable to anyone with any other | language background, and was probably the first word which popped to his | mind. | | I don't get _how_ that could cause any confusion at all, let alone offence. why don't you _try_ to understand rather than repeat that you don't? you're facing the same problem faced by people who aren't used to how racial issues work in the United States. if you're used to say "black" in your environment and some people have a serious reaction to that in some other environment because it has a whole truck-load of very wrong connotations, _you_ are the fool for not recognizing this and trying to respect that the connotations are undesirable and use something else without those same connotations, not the person who objects to your usage or "terminology". viz, "library" has a lot of connotations that are strongly invalid for Common Lisp. listen to that fact. try to understand the history of that fact. try to figure out why people object to the term along with such things as that Common Lisp doesn't "link" with libraries, doesn't produce "object files" and doesn't come with a "library manager", doesn't "resolve" undefined symbols, etc. on the other hand, how we choose to organize Lisp programs in memory and on disk is a completely separate problem from the language. we might very well organize the system such that (1) some functions are loaded from disk on demand, (2) some functions are in some particular shared libraries, (3) some functions are written in a different language and actually form a static-language type "library" in the boot-up process. none of this, however, has any bearing at all on the way Lisp sees these functions. the concept "library" is therefore _destructive_ in getting to the proper way to view a Lisp system, because you will forever focus on the wrong part of the system and the way it is organized. | Seriously, though, I really like how Lisp's age seems to lend it | perspective on issues like this. Other languages seem to imagine that | they have to get threads added NOW; Lisp just kinda goes: okay, let it | wait one or ten years. (what became) Common Lisp has also _had_ threads for about twenty years, without the clamor for standardization that we see today. people have been satisfied with the way things have worked in the various Lisps, and the desire to standardize the obviously immature hasn't been very vocal until fairly recently, _because_ neophytes in language land make a huge point of having a very simple version of what most Lisps already support. | IMO, this NG is one of the worst for getting information I've been on. that's because you insist on deciding the form in which you will accept it. other people have been near ecstatic about this newsgroup because they are (gently) forced to think about unusual issues and rethink their position on others. you don't seem to appreciate this interaction at all, so of course you will not find what you're looking for -- as witness your desire to force others to accept that "library" is acceptable here. you will fail, because it is not the right concept. your insistence is creating a lot of unnecessary friction. other people who insist on bringing a lot of friction to the newsgroup for basically the same reason: they don't want to learn things at the level they actually need to learn them, but think they know a lot more than they do because they feel they deserve to, by virtue of knowing something else well. all I can say is that it's strange that it is people with this attitude that call people here "primadonnas" and "all-so superior" and other evidence of inferiority complexes hard at work. the fact is that there is nothing wrong in being a novice at something if you are an expert at something else -- if you really are good, you will not be a novice for long -- but the more you pretend you're an expert, the longer it will take to become one for real. #:Erik -- save the children: just say NO to sex with pro-lifers