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Comment by astrange | Hacker News Reader

Every Lisp programmer I've ever met is like this. I don't know why, but it's probably Erik Naggum's fault. They used to be called "Lisp weenies" and now would be called "abusers".

(The Clojure and Racket people are supposedly nice.)

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I've seen Erik Naggum's name mentioned in this context before, but years ago I looked through a bunch of his contribution on comp.lang.lisp and couldn't see anything justifying this reputation. His articles rather looked quite eloquent and thought-through. Could you provide an example?

Alas it's been a long time and I don't remember enough anymore. I just remember what I used to remember.

There's some here (http://xahlee.info/Netiquette_dir/death_of_a_troll.html) and classic discussion can be found at (https://wiki.c2.com/?SocialProblemsOfLisp). The rest of the odd pattern of every Lisp programmer I've ever met being an asshole is mostly lost to IRC history, but I guess RMS is another example.

I've accessed that wiki.c2 for various discussions about programming before. However, I get confused with the format, specially here where it seems like a thread full of comments (no mention of usernames) there. (I like the relative minimalism and simplicity of the discourse though)

I just re-read Xah's notes and all of that rings a bell, but off of comp.lang.lisp Erik could be incredibly kind in helping other programmers. I was working my way through an early edition of _A programmer's guide to Common Lisp_ by Deborah Tatar and got absolutely stumped on the chapter on macros. Erik worked with me over email until we actually found what appeared to be a typo in the example source code and was incredibly patient with my dumb mistakes.

"God help you if you are going to write your first interpreter in C of all things... Without manual intervention[,] C programs do pretty much no error detection... I hate C with a passion." -- Hayley Patton, Don't Build Your Own Lisp

"What a whiny little bitch." -- wudangmonk, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27601530

When I look at these two statements, I wouldn't describe the first as being particularly abusive.

I've found the Emacs Lisp crowd to also be nice.

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