From ... Path: archiver1.google.com!newsfeed.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news.uchicago.edu!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!howland.erols.net!npeer.kpnqwest.net!nreader1.kpnqwest.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: the "loop" macro References: <3B88815A.B5D98835@rcn.com> <9mbcpu$4ht$1@rznews2.rrze.uni-erlangen.de> <9mdom7$n9s$1@news.gte.com> <9mdrrc$eqm$1@rznews2.rrze.uni-erlangen.de> <86snecech6.fsf@gondolin.local.net> <3208003338948541@naggum.net> <3208031073980045@naggum.net> Mail-Copies-To: never From: Erik Naggum Message-ID: <3208051533652127@naggum.net> Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway Lines: 271 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/20.7 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2001 05:25:39 GMT X-Complaints-To: newsmaster@Norway.EU.net X-Trace: nreader1.kpnqwest.net 999062739 193.90.207.26 (Wed, 29 Aug 2001 07:25:39 MET DST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2001 07:25:39 MET DST Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.lisp:15034 * John Foderaro > Does anyone else feel that I don't have the right to define my own macro > to express the conditional statement? That is not the issue. Such rights have never been questioned. > Does anyone else feel that I don't have the right to criticize: if, when, > unless and loop? That is not the issue. Such rights have never been questioned. > If it's antisocial to extend the Common Lisp language ... That is not the issue. Nobody has ever even indicated that as the reason. > An extension that big puts my little if* to shame. Surely someone who > designs something like that is the most antisocial of all. To those who have studied criminology and recognize the behvioral pattern of somebody who is determined not to understand why what he has done is under criticism, your chosen line of defense is the most incriminating and revealing. You did this the last time you tried to defend a piece of buggy code, too, and it showed us that John Foderaro does not back down. Clearly, having the right to denounce the standard that your company is asking its customers to trust it to implement for them is more important than realizing that by your denouncing what people want to purchase from you, you undermine your own livelihood. Further, distancing yourself from the process and pretending to be a victim of conspiracies against your "superior solutions" indicates that the standardization process, which people trust to produce standards that vendors are supposed to agree to implement, is actively _distrusted_ by you and by Franz Inc. The message you send is not "we have something better", but instead "We hate Common Lisp as it became standardized by a bunch of morons, but do come talk to us if you want an implementation of that crock of shit." Apparently, you fail to understand that you can improve upon something without denouncing what you improve upon. You do not make something that is better than what people already like -- you have to make them hate what they have in order for what you have done to be better. Such is not actually improvement -- it is the childish game of "not invented here". This is the dangerous part of your personality and what I react to most. The dangerous _consequence_ is that you are fully willing to sacrifice your professionalism and other people's trust in your competence as a programmer with a serious vendor to your personal opinion about matters of _zero_ importance to the future of Common Lisp and its market share and ability to solve real problems. Clearly, it is much more important to vent your spleen about if, when, unless, and loop than to help build a business case for Common Lisp and to help attract people to the language ("Use Common Lisp and come join the Common Lisp community and take part in the hate campaigns against the best language on earth."). Clearly, you do not appreciate that my trying to push Common Lisp to people who have the money and the trust in me as a consultant that could land Franz Inc another large contract should cause you to beam with love for the language your products implement, but instead you spend your time denouncing the standard and the process that created it, creating the very strong impression in every reasonably intelligent reader of your rantings about language misdesign that you have gone elsewhere yourself, so why should anyone new to the language ever stick with Common Lisp? You will probably never understand this, since you continue to believe that you are "innovative" the same way Microsoft is, but the way you ask people who actually happen to like Common Lisp to hate it insteead, lest they be branded religious zealots and worse, is telling people to stay away from John Foderaro's sick mind and anyone who keeps him employed in a position where his blind hatred for irrelevant features causes him to write and publish buggy code and refuse to understand that it needs to be fixed because he thinks the problem is in the specification. It is not your changes that causes me to react. It is your arrogance. It is not your desire for improvements more to your liking that causes me to react. It is your intense denunciation of everything that I need to entrust my own livelihood and professional reputation to your products. It is not the fact that you are a deranged lunatic that makes me want to terminate my business dealings with Franz Inc. It is the fact that they keep a deranged lunatic employed in a position where his utter lack of professionalism and professional integrity may cause serious damage to my own or my client's software in a production setting where bugs you have introduced because you do not consider my trust in the specification you distrust a valid concern or a reason to write correct code or to fix bugs, and hence I will lose money and possibly face lawsuits if I _do_ trust you. I am a businessman, John Foderaro. You are not. I deal with people's trust in me and my competence every single day. You have never grasped that I question your trustworthiness. To my paying clients, the only thing that matters is my professionalism. They do not care whether I have personal opinions about the products we use or not. I may thus love Allegro CL _personally_ and I may grief in _private_ about the idiocy of your self-destructive behavior, but I would be criminally unprofessional if I asked a client of mine to invest USD 100,000 in my love for a product that cannot be trusted to perform as required by specification for such a fantastically stupid reason as one idiot engineer giving a higher priority to his dislike for language features over correct code. This is a bigger issue than you appear able to understand, John Foderaro. Nobody cares what you think about if, when, unless, and loop when they face a delay in deployment because of one of your bugs. Nobody cares about your silly coding standards when a project folds because a feature in the specification is not supported for "political reasons". We have a standard, and nobody cares where it came from, God, Devil, committee, or John Foderaro, but everyone in the kinds of businesses I deal with care that it is actually and faithfully implemented. Based on the evidence that you provide about your priorities for Common Lisp and your own code, I _must_, because I am a professional, decline to suggest that people who would be willing to invest several hundred thousand dollars over the next few years on their trust in my word, invest it in Allegro CL. In short, your insistence that you be allowed to denounce the standard, the standardization process, us "zealots", and everyone who disagrees with your fantastically stupid "improvements" and "coding standards", has a pretty hefty price tag. Your employer needs to understand that your desire for a John Foderaro Lisp instead of a Common Lisp has caused me, a fairly strongly devoted fan of Allegro CL, to abandon Allegro CL as the choice implementation platform. I do not personally consider there to be viable alternatives, which means that we will probably use a different language. Now, this has not just happened this once, the last time we had a fight over your prioritizing your personal opinions over correct implementation of specified language features, I did not even bother to waste my time arguing for Common Lisp. That project went with Java, simply because I was too personally exhausted by your idiotic behavior to want to fight for Allegro CL. I know I could have won that project. The question I put towards you, John Foderaro, is this: Does it matter so much to you to be able to denounce that which people come to you and to Franz Inc to purchase that you are willing to let go of customers who do not like that denunciation and who get the impression that you will do an unprofessional job if asked to implement something you have some personal issue with? If it matters that much to you, good riddance to both you and Franz Inc. If you can get through your thick skull that maybe you can get what you want if you back down and start to behave professionally, maybe, just _maybe_, it is possible to get Franz Inc to take conformance seriously and actually put fixing deviations from the specification on top of the list of prioritized tasks and thus help rebuild its trust. > You readers of this newgroup set the tenor of the lisp community. Shall > it be as Erik wants where criticism of the standard is squelched, that > new ideas are forbidden? That is not the issue. That is not what I do. It is not criticism that you engage in, it is a political campaign of distrust in the process that created the standard. If it were criticism, you would respect the process and its results. You do neither. If it were criticism, you would trust the process to yield better results with better input. You very obviously do not believe this, but instead take it upon yourself to do what you will, regardless of process or procedure. > You the lisp community has to decide. Erik may speak the loudest but > don't be put off by that. Speak your own mind. Yes, let us see a show of hands from the all people who do understand the issues of trust, conformance, respect for procedure, and compromise in order to gain something _higher_ than immediate personal satisfaction. I used to have doubts that you were mentally incapable of understanding the issues that surround your antisocial behavior and your strong disdain for the community standardization process, but I have been forced by the sheer mass of evidence that you yourself provide to conclude that you do, in fact, not have the mental apparatus to understand what standardization means for a community and for the trust one may have in products. The concept of trust in professionalism is probably also forever beyond your reach as you continue to behave in the most _unprofessional_ way I have seen anyone in any community ever do. Your immense lack of honesty and personal integrity when it comes to representing the views and opinions of others contributes to your lack of understanding of what other people are trying to address. This are further strong indications of a deeply antisocial personality. Your behavior in regard to the case issue and the line of defense you choose when under criticism for your rampant disregard for community "compromise" in favor of "John Foderaro's way", whatever the cost may be, indicates that you are incapable of dealing with more advanced concepts of cooperation than "do it my way or no way". Since this is also how you interpret any criticism towards you, it seems highly unlikely that you have the ability to understand what the issues are surrounding your conscious and willful destruction of the public trust in Franz Inc's commitment to implement a conforming Common Lisp implementation and the construction of a reciprocal distrust towards the antisocial behavior of Franz Inc when it comes to breaking the standard in order to push some miniscule changes for personal reasons. I concluded that I could not trust you or _any_ of your code when you flat out _refused_ to recognize the bug in the piece of code you posted, because I understood the full implications of your political agenda: It is more important for John Foderaro to denounce people than to help me and anyone else who wants to make money programming in Common Lisp with Allegro CL. It is fairly obvious that I have the exact reverse priority. And people wonder why Common Lisp does not "win"? It is not because of the language, it is because of the self-destructive morons in this community who think it is conducive to their personal goals to denounce and ridicule and fight the common goal. John Foderaro and his case, pathname, character vs integer, if-when-unless, loop, etc, etc, issues. Bruno Haible and his large bunch of issues. Paul Graham and his bunch of issues against the language. People who appear, on the surface, to have done good work for Common Lisp return time and again to denounce the language, its community, and everything that _could_ bind us together. Why would anyone in their right mind want to use Common Lisp when the people who do (seem) use it are so negative towards the language? Over the years, people have asked me how I can make money at all doing the things I do for a living. I have always been way, way off mainstream and still made a reasonable living. I think the reason is pretty clear: I love what I do and do what I love. People pick up on it and trust me professionally because of the fact that I have a high personal investment in what I do. Likewise, I think people pick up on those who hate what they do and do what they hate. Judging from the behavior of a large number of Lisp people, it seems clear to me now that the problem we have is that people do not love Lisp and the do not use it, because it is more important to them to hate some miniscule little misfeature than to love the whole of it and live with the "warts", if any. It also seems to me that people are reluctant to leave, but prefer to hang around and be nay-sayers and negative influences on those who _want_ to like Lisp. We see it from people who come here, too, they pick up the negative attitude towards the language _very_ quickly. I am probably very fortunate who can do what I do, but I honestly think that if you do not do what you love to do, it is because you decided at the wrong time that you would quit searching and settle for the money or something. That is _poverty_. If you cannot love more than the money you get for doing something, at least be smart enough to love that, and it should be easy to pretend that you love your work so you can continue to make money. If you cannot even pretend, why are you not searching for something better? How much effort can it _be_ to learn a new trade or a new programming language? I mean, _kids_ learn these things. Kids are _not_ smart. Kids do not have tons of experience and stuff that makes things easier to learn. Kids absorb stuff faster than grownups, but they still need a lot of time getting used to _working_. Grownups _work_. When grownups _want_ to learn something new, they do it way faster than kids do. At least if they are pretty intelligent, and Lisp people are ipso facto pretty intelligent, so there simply is no excuse for a disgruntled Lisper to hang around and be so negative about Lisp. This makes me wonder what kind of personal value it has to a disgruntled Lisper to hang around in the Lisp community and denounce the language, the standard, the people behind the standard, and nigh everything that says a _positive_ word about either or all of them. I trust that people smarter than John Foderaro understand that criticism is not the same as denunciation. Criticism has a fundamental respect for that which is criticized and a desire to see it realize a potential that it may not yet have realized fully. Denunciation is disrespect for the potential _and_ its realization, however incomplete. Good criticism will always see how the current realization reflects the potential, not deny that it does, which denunciation would do. Good criticism embodies an understanding and appreciation of how something came to be, because nothing can really be "improved" by first breaking with its genesis -- that would be replacing a lot more than that which needs improving. This is why "X is broken, here's an incompatible fix" is _not_ good criticism, but bad. Bad criticism presumes that the current realization defeats the potential without actually establishing that premise to be true. (It does happen, unfortunately, as it does with attributes in SGML.) John Foderaro has made this into an election and a popularity contest. My take on this is that people who have nothing better to do than to denounce the standard, the process by which it was created, and the people who did it, be shot down and thrown out of the community. Let those who _like_ Common Lisp use it, and let the nay-sayers leave us alone to do what we think best. Those who _like_ Common Lisp will have lots of ideas for improvement, too, but at least they can trust that the other people they sit down with and compromise with are all good people, instead of disgruntled nay-sayers who did not get their will last time and never got over it. Maybe there even are things that are broken and not well thought out, but if you like the language, you will care for it and its users, not chop off parts according to personal distastes and scare people off because _they_ liked the part that got chopped off. Now I have a Common Lisp application to update with new requirements that are easily met before its users get to work in a couple hours. And since this is an election: Remember to vote for Common Lisp with your heart -- it is the good language for good people. Remember who _likes_ Common Lisp when you want to trust people to take care of its future. ///