Subject: Re: Newbie - 2 MORE Small problems? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 01:39:15 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3224799565333705@naggum.net> * Thomas Bushnell, BSG | When you call Scheme a "toy Lisp", you are trolling, much like those | who call Lisp a toy language. Maybe it seems that way if you haven't | done much really serious programming in it, of real sophisticated | systems. | | Any language without call/cc looks totally like a toy to me, actually. The key was the difference between the communities. Scheme is a toy seen from Common Lisp. This is a Common Lisp forum. Whatever Scheme freaks need to disparage in order to feel good about Perl, no, wait, Scheme, is trolling in comp.lang.lisp. I find it odd that you did not recognize that you were trolling to begin with, and only got "insulted" when you got a response in kind. Scheme freaks go nuts about set! and call upon various deities to ensure that people who use it do not get a second chance, while Kent Pitman has offered us a reasonable distinction between intra-scope assignment and extra-scope side-effects. So Scheme's silly knee-jerk reaction to set! is the same as the knee-jerk reaction to goto -- failure to understand when it has its uses causes a religious response to its presence. I also wonder why you keep trolling if you think it is in any way inappropriate. Me, I think poking fun at Scheme is one of the few available pleasures that nobody could _possibly_ be hurt by, since it is such a toy language. Now, if I posted that in comp.lang.scheme, it would be trolling and insulting. Much like it would have been if I had posted any of my acidic comments on that XML failure to comp.text.xml. And considering all the venomous crap that Scheme freaks pour over the real Lisp, I think we should stay away from Northern Ireland-like ways to deal with our feeling "insulted" by what other people say. Including, but not limited to people who now are "insulted" by my reference to the bellicose cultures of Northern Ireland. Trust me, if I had used Israel and Palestine as the canonical example of, no, wait, let's not do that. /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.