Subject: Re: Lisp is alive
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1996/10/01
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3053121642008895@naggum.no>


[Cyber Surfer]

|   Ahh, elistism.  You're the problem.  Why is Lisp not more successful?
|   Because you're don't care about that.

That's _such_ a cheap argument.  I can only hope you don't mean it.

First, I don't control the Lisp world in any way, and I have no expectation
or even desire to have any impact on the mass market for _anything_.  I
don't care about it, remember?  I mean that _literally_.

Second, elitism is rejection of the masses.  I don't reject the _masses_.
I reject the mass marketing techniques employed to affect them -- a very
big difference.  I also reject the products marketed by such fraudulent
means as is used in the software world for PCs.  Just as I thought "there
_must_ be a better way" for years while I was finding small ways to write
better programs in C until I could write them in Lisp and transcend it all,
"there _must_ be a better way" to affect programmers than to hit them with
the same kind of shit that sells the current generation of languages and
tools, indeed which makes them the only viable solutions in certain
settings, as you have pointed out repeatedly.

In brief: we can't win by engaging in mass marketing techniques on their
premises.  We haven't in the past, and we won't in the future.  We must do
something entirely different.  What?  If I knew, I'd already have done it.

#\Erik
-- 
I could tell you, but then I would have to reboot you.