Subject: Re: Rudeness index was Looking for Lisp compiler
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 30 Dec 2002 21:31:06 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3250272666307367@naggum.no>

* Chris Gehlker
| This is all speculation anyway. I did do one experiment to test it
| though. I searched a couple of Visual Basic groups for any signs
| that the posters were as angry as the typical poster here. They
| clearly are not.

  Did that include the newbies who rush in to make bold claims that
  the standard is broken and they have to tell everyone what it says
  because before they came along, all Common Lisp programmers and
  language lawyers were living in the dark?

  I have never seen the kind of pestering idiots we suffer here in
  comp.lang.lisp regularly anywhere else on this planet.  When I
  spent a lot more time trying to explain SGML to people, we had
  people who came rushing in to proclaim that so and so was broken
  and badly designed, but they actually /listened/ when they were
  told how and why it became that way and how it worked and how they
  could get what they wanted.  Peculiar to the comp.lang.lisp newbie
  is that he does not listen and does not stop talking.  And every
  one of them have evidently read previous posts where they find fuel
  for their massive confusion as well as reason to resist correction.

  Fighting off the lunatic fringe that invades comp.lang.lisp is like
  debunking physics lunatics like Santilli and his "magnecules" or
  discussing medicine in the presence of "alternative" medicinemen.
  The core problem is that some people will insist that whatever they
  heard first must be truer than anything they hear later, and they
  are just as obnoxious if they first hear some bogosity as if they
  think they grok Common Lisp from tinkering with Emacs Lisp.

-- 
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.