Well, shit. Educational, but filled with bile. This post is an example of how to go wrong and make yourself and everyone around you unhappy, while still being right.
Brings back unhappy memories of the conversation style in Usenet. I didn't dare to use newsgroups after I asked some wrong thing as a 15-year-old in some computing-related group and got dumped on by angry adult men.
I get it that they were frustrated by Eternal September and whatever. But thinking back to those times makes me appreciate the moderation culture that dang has created here, as well as the non-linear structure that moves less popular comments out of the way of attention.
He's responding to Xah Lee, well known to be one of the most abrasive and unpleasant people in the lisp community. The hostility might not be desired but it was certainly earned.
Xah Lee wasn't a part of the Lisp community. He was a Usenet troll, active in several programming related newsgroups, not just comp.lang.lisp. He had never written a line of Lisp (or anything more challenging) and never contributed anything, during his Usenet times. His effect on these newsgroups was extremely negative. Discussing with him was useless. Erik Naggum tried and failed (as others did). Erik was a part of the Lisp community, but unfortunately also with negative behavior, especially on comp.lang.lisp. He could write long&useful explanations, but discussions with him were often not pleasant.
Those pages usually just say "Something went wrong. Try reloading."
After several reloads, I was able to see that the second one said, "lol, this [redacted] lispm [redacted] is badmouthing me again," the third one was basically a link to http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/hackernews_lispm.html, and the first one was a repost of some of the (extremely abrasive and unpleasant) text on that page.†
On his page about Naggum, which is linked from the above, he writes:
> During 1998 to 2004 when i read comp.lang.lisp mostly of his posts, i also post maybe a couple a month on average. Most of my posts are trolls (of the good sort (see: Netiquette Anthropology.)), and part of it is riding his name, criticizing or making fun of his attackers, and criticizing or lampoon him too. They are mostly not technical. Most are writing exercises too.
This does clearly demonstrate that the characterization in this thread of Xah Lee as abrasive, unpleasant, and a Usenet troll is correct.
Of course line counts measure effort (the cost) rather than any measure of actual user benefit. But I think we can fairly say that Xah has by now put more effort into writing code for the Lisp community than Naggum did in his lifetime.
† Personal conflicts between lispm and Xah go back many years. http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/scheme_fail.html is one of numerous places where Xah personally attacked lispm, in this case because of a factual disagreement about the historical dynamics of programming language adoption.
> However, it also appears that lispm's characterization of Xah as never having written a line of Lisp hasn't been correct for many years.
Read again what I wrote above: "He had never written a line of Lisp (or anything more challenging) and never contributed anything, during his Usenet times." The "during his Usenet times" applies to both parts. People often asked on something like comp.lang.lisp for programming help, I can't remember that he actually wrote solutions or debugged problems (unlike, for example, Erik Naggum, who was providing his expertise). All I ever saw was him derailing discussions about the language.
Later then he was configuring GNU Emacs keybindings. He was then, later, scripting GNU Emacs.
Sure he doesn't like to be reminded of his destructive role as one of the most active trolls in Usenet programming related newsgroups. The Usenet archives document this though and he has actually said that he was trolling back then.
It's a bit sad that you waste your time with this topic... That's the hole I was talking about. Get out of it.
With that qualification I think your criticism of Xah is correct, although it entails that debate and trolling don't constitute "contributing anything". That, in turn entails that Naggum's thousands of posts also don't constitute any sort of a "contribution", though of course the small amount of functionality he added to Emacs does. This is debatable, but I do believe it's correct.
It's puzzling to me that you responded to my comment, which quoted Xah saying that he was trolling back then, by saying, "The Usenet archives document this though and he has actually said that he was trolling back then." Possibly you didn't see that part of my comment; did I edit it in after you read it? Certainly I edited it in before you posted your comment, because my editing window for that comment closed 19 minutes before you posted yours. Were there other parts of the comment that you also didn't read?
I don't think he's stopped being a destructive troll, but without Naggum's enthusiastic collaboration he is much less effective. I'd like to say that the changes in the online environment over the last 20 years have reduced the damage that any single troll can do, but eight years ago a Twitter troll got himself elected President of the USA, and seems likely to do so again.
When you say "this topic", I'm not sure whether you mean "the history of Lisp"† or "the social dynamics of online communities", but in either case you can save your tears; both of those topics are fascinating and enormously rewarding to study. Your demand to "get out of it" is not appreciated—it is a breach of civility to elevate yourself above me in that fashion, as if I were your servant—and I will not comply with it.
I asked you a similar question attempting to clarify what you meant in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41760084, and I appreciate your slight clarification on that question here. I've put a lot of effort into attempting to understand your flames so that I can respond to the substance they have, but without your collaboration it's impossible.
______
† This gloss seems unlikely, because you've dedicated a lot of time studying this topic yourself.
It doesn't look like Xah was really trolling here, most of his responses are pretty polite. And he seems to indicate at this point in time he wasn't really familiar with lisp, so I'd venture to guess he wasn't nearly as prominent as he later became.
Most of the stuff I've seen has not been so polite, he's such a notorious hater. Still, it can be entertaining in a way, in small doses (I imagine I'd feel a bit different if I was forced to share a newsgroup commons for years), and such a critic can provide a good perspective once in a while. Even though he's still around I think of him as a character as much as Naggum was, even if they were very different in important ways. The world is richer from having more characters.
The other day I ran into a "gem" from Xah that just made me laugh at its expression. Willing to tank the karma/flag to reproduce:
① I fucking hate this motherfucking tech geeking hacker fucks who
leave dead links on the web and don't fucking care. What the fuck?
Aren't these elite, elegant, coding experts who always take perfection
in algorithm, code, style, language, etc?
I don't understand, how could they, have their home page dead?
I laughed again when some followup links to his site 404'd. It's not at all a fair attack, but man, sometimes I really hate dead links too...
I think he's hilarious, and at a time where a lot of programming pundits only pretend to be subversive and shameless, I welcome Xah's unflitered presentation of his opinions. He often makes a lot of good points, and I tend to find his stances on things thought-provoking even if I disagree with him.
That was Naggum's trademark: Extremely good explanations coupled with zero tolerance for fools. As long as you asked him a question in good faith, he treated you with courtesy. But I confess I relished the entertainment of reading his deconstructions of bad-faith actors.
Naggum died much too young. I hope he has found peace.
And these people always say they're "just being direct".
It's a good litmus test for me in my own writing. Am I actually being direct or just indulging in anger? What happens if I just get to the point and say what I want? I have found I get more of what I want that way.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen those photos on the wikipedia page, which I took. He was very photogenic. He came to Berkeley for a Lisp conference. Brings back some really good memories. Thanks.
Naggum destroyed the Lisp community by driving away everyone who didn't relish it. (Like you, Xah Lee did relish it, even when the bad-faith actor being "deconstructed" was a character he was playing—perhaps especially then!) He also had, as you can see in this post, zero tolerance for people preferring different tradeoffs from his own (often because they held different values), which fragmented it.
German has this great word for your comment: "unterkomplex". The English "simplistic" might come near. comp.lang.lisp was not "the Lisp community", Naggum did not single handedly destroy it, you ignore the other participants, the general Usenet dynamics and its overall fate...
Usenet was important for the development of many other language communities, and Lisp was denied that opportunity. Naggum didn't act alone, certainly, and bad blood existed in the Lisp community since before Usenet (Stallman is a difficult person, and we can all be grateful he never actually bombed the Symbolics offices), but he was the pivotal figure in how things played out in the late 01990s. There wasn't a Naggum-free alternative general Lisp venue where new users (or Lispers who merely disagreed with Naggum, such as Schemers) could post without fear of public humiliation, so mostly they didn't. It's a rare undergraduate who doesn't count public humiliation among their worst fears, and for people like Steele, Weinreb, Gabriel, Friedman, and Stallman, participation on Usenet was all downside with no upside.
Lisp started to recover immediately when Naggum died. Or, more accurately, when he got too sick to post.
I could make the same criticism of HN, but to a much smaller degree.
Kaz is of course correct that in Lisp, as in any language, there's a silent majority of programmers who don't post in public forums like Usenet. But they depend on the efforts of those who do for things like FAQs and free software.
None of this has to do with me; I can't have posted to comp.lang.lisp more than a few times, and I don't recall ever interacting with Naggum.
Most of what I've said is self-evidently correct, and almost all of the rest is relatively easy to verify by reading the archives of old mailing lists and Usenet.
The only exception is my insinuation that Stallman was tempted to bomb the Symbolics offices, which I don't have a reliable source for; maybe you could find out by asking Stallman, or Stallman's former friends and former coworkers.
"self-evidently correct" is not a good word if you want to discuss things with people who were actually active in the wider Lisp communities, including comp.lang.lisp, other newsgroups, various mailing lists, Lisp conferences, etc.
My objective here is not to attack you for your partisan support of Naggum; rather, I want to understand what alternative perspective you're coming from in which my observations perhaps aren't self-evidently correct—though I note that you've carefully avoided actually saying they aren't, leaving open the interpretation that it's just that you wish I'd phrase it differently.
> My objective here is not to attack you for your partisan support of Naggum
Look, I'm not supporting Naggum.
From the actual Lisp users I've met in real life, few were reading comp.lang.lisp, almost none was posting there. Very few would even know who the people there were.
The actual people in the Lisp community I admire are many - I could list 100 - they had a much greater impact on what was happening. Most of them never used comp.lang.lisp . Among women the participation rate was near zero!
Most of the interesting communication was in specific communities over mailing lists. I fondly remember SLUG (the Symbolics Lisp Users Group), the MCL mailing list, and several others.
comp.lang.lisp had the most negative impact by trolls, like the one Naggum was answering, which caused endless bullshit discussions and which had very destructive behavior. We never found a way to deal with that. What it killed in the end was that the time for Usenet was over, Google groups, spam, it was mostly irrelevant and a much more toxic Internet took over. See 4chan, various Reddit groups (though the Lisp subreddits at Reddit do better) and X for much worse communication systems. Plus Lisp was in a general demise in the 90s. Not the Usenet caused the demise of Lisp, but the demise of Lisp was causing a general lack of interest. Cause and effect were different of what you claim.
For you the contact to Lisp could be mostly net related (?). When I was learning at the university roughly up to 20 professors were in some way or another involved in Lisp projects. There were people I've seen in real life, often daily. There were many people with deep Lisp knowledge (and this was not even the US). You can bet that none of them used or cared about comp.lang.lisp. Same for the people in the projects and the students.
What you think was "the Lisp community", was just a popular online community of mostly random people, with less impact on what actually happened in the Lisp communities, then you believe.
It seems like our points of view are closer together than I had thought.
I first learned about Lisp because my uncle lent me a Lisp textbook; later, an executive at the company I was working at lent me SICP and exploded my brain. Most actual Lisp users I've met in real life weren't reading comp.lang.lisp either. But it's true that most of my contact with Lisp has been over the internet.
That's because most of my contact with any technical discipline has been over the internet, because almost everyone's has been, for 30 years now. It would be inconceivable to say, 25 years ago, "Most actual Perl users I've met don't read comp.lang.perl.misc," or, "Most actual Python users I've met don't read comp.lang.python," but it was and is true of Lisp. Sharing code and discussions over the internet has been a superpower for the programming-language communities that have managed it, including cross-language communities; I first got to know pg on the Lightweight Languages mailing list, for example. Meanwhile, Lisp users were isolated in the kinds of tiny single-implementation ghettoes you describe, or were collaborating only with other researchers at the same institution.
What I'm pointing to is precisely the fact that comp.lang.lisp was just mostly random people with little impact on what actually happened in Lisp. Every person who might have taken up Lisp, who instead focused on Perl or PHP or Haskell, was a missed opportunity for Lisp to thrive. As with the undiscovered antibiotics resulting from our current pharmaceuticals regulatory regime, the costs are invisible, but staggering. They are the Lispers that weren't born during the 01990s, the Lisps that didn't get finished or even started, the libraries that got written in Perl or JavaScript because Quicklisp and Leiningen didn't exist yet (as far as I can tell, there's still no equivalent for Scheme.)
You're right that trolls like Xah were what made comp.lang.lisp unusable. However, despite the almost 800 lines of code he contributed to Emacs, Naggum was one of them—the worst of all. Those 800 lines are apparently the totality of his public code, and in total they're smaller than some of his individual hate-filled posts to comp.lang.lisp. The period of Naggum's unquestioned domination of the newsgroup was precisely the period during which Usenet was the most important groupware medium. And the practice of establishing dominance by public ridicule didn't end at the boundaries of Usenet; as dang points out above, to this day we still have to combat it in virtually every public discussion of Lisp. That's Naggum's lasting legacy.
Since he became inactive, though, the situation has improved dramatically. We have Arc, Clojure (and Leiningen!), SBCL (which started while Naggum was still active but took years to become popular), the entire Racket empire (now built on the redoubtable Chez compiler), several new "Little" books, miniKANREN, Hy, Quicklisp, R7RS-small, and, as you point out, reasonably functional subreddits. #Lisp on Libera is a pleasant place, and Emacs Lisp and Guile now have native-code compilers. ACL2 and PVS are significant minorities in formal methods. You can even run PDP-1 LISP, or modify and reassemble it with MIDAS.
I don't think that's true, although maybe you could define "Perl programmers" to include people who downloaded broken, insecure CGI scripts from Matt's Script Archive and made random changes to them until they seemed to work. Even a lot of those people relied on clpm for guidance—often asking questions rather than just lurking. As you can remember, we didn't have Stack Overflow at the time, or even PerlMonks, so clpm was pretty much the main public forum for people to ask questions or announce libraries. Corporate and academic institutions to support Perl basically didn't exist; perl.com was running off Tom Christiansen's home internet connection for several years.
I don't know what "hole" you're talking about. The hole of correctly describing how the Lisp community destroyed itself by permitting Naggum to dominate its public communications, and to some extent has recovered since then?
Perhaps you're implicitly criticizing me for violating some taboo so dreadful you don't dare even to name it; for example, a taboo on speaking ill of the dead. Unfortunately, any truthful accounting of almost any tragic historical events requires willingness to speak ill of the dead, so I'm more than willing to "dig" myself into that "hole". I'd like to invite you to join me here; cowering in fear like that is unworthy of you.
comp.lang.lisp is not the same thing as "the Lisp community".
Even in the heyday, the Usenet news groups represented a minority. For any language, OS or tech stack, there were many more programmers off Usenet than on.
A programming language newsgroup represents the intersection between interest in that language and interest in Usenet.
He made it a kind of game or culture. Also iiuc he's answering to a certain person who was known to be regularly walking on the line of trolling. That might have added more fuel to the fire.
Erik Naggum (RIP) was particularly noted for having lots of bile if you got on the wrong side of him.
Xah Lee is noted for being especially abrasive and pretty much gets on the wrong side of everybody.
Putting the two together was always a spectacle worth a bucket or two of popcorn.
And, the real answer to "Why cons cells?" is the same reason as "What is up with the names car and cdr?". The only two data structures which are cheap enough (in both RAM and CPU) for the machines of the time (IBM 704 from 1954!) to deal with are arrays (via index registers) and pairs (via register sections which gives us car/cdr).
It is possible for your brain to parse information from people you don't have a personal connection with as what the message is and skip the how. Not sure why people get lit up by the how; who cares about that from people you don't give a toss about? These days you have AI for it; Claude can give you a lovely summary of the facts without the how. My brain does that automatically since I was in high school. Comments from anyone but close friends or close relatives cannot make me 'unhappy', no matter what they are.
