If you want to learn Lisp, be ready to meet the scowling faces (and don't even think about mentioning PG in #lisp)

Re:If you want to learn Lisp, be ready to meet the scowling ... by machine on Wednesday June 20, 2007 @09:27PM (#29705)

I have to say, I'm not that sympathetic. If you are using open source software, you can't expect free support, and you definitely can't expect immediate free support. Plus, it actually looks like you got each of your questions answered within an hour, which is pretty impressive actually.

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Re:If you want to learn Lisp, be ready to meet the scowling ... by palish on Thursday June 21, 2007 @12:44AM (#29742)

No problem. If you're using Google, you can't expect to get your results in 0.13 seconds. If you're playing a free game, you can't expect it to be fun. If you're in News.YC, you can't expect to interact with smart people, like yourself. If you use software, you can't expect things to work.

With that said, I wasn't expecting free support, nor immediate free support, and the answers I received were extremely helpful. There are wonderful, nice, and extraordinarily talented people on #lisp who are more intelligent than I could ever hope to become in my wildest dreams. However, there's a good deal of elitism, too. Statements like "There is no Lisp community, this is just an IRC channel" just reinforce that. You end up not being attached to the place you live in. You don't even feel like you live there; you just happen to be there. It's kind of like working at a company where you don't own any of the software you write (in the sense of, this is my module; if it breaks, I'm responsible, and its design choices are my call). If you think of your car as a hunk of metal, you're far less likely to oil its engine regularly.

I'm contrasting the Lisp experience with the Ruby and Python experience. In the Lisp world, things aren't obvious. It's not the programming language that's at fault, it's the interfaces. Things can make a great deal of sense when designed a certain way but require several steps and much thought. Or things can be simpler and require little thinking so people can focus their thoughts on what matters to them: creating the systems they want to create. Top that off with a community that might throw malicious code at a newbie or throw a patient response and you have a tough situation. It's the difference between a website's creators feeling they're doing users a favor by letting them visit versus feeling proud that they're making people happy.

Things don't need to be this way, and I'm confident that there will be changes for the better. Those wonderful, intelligent souls I referred to earlier will help turn the tide. Secretly, everyone wants to be perceived as a nice person, and building a community in which you can improve the life of just one person is a fabulous experience.

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Re:If you want to learn Lisp, be ready to meet the scowling ... by omouse on Thursday June 21, 2007 @12:18AM (#29735)

The point of open source software is to act as an alternative to the proprietary stuff out there. Therefore, you can and should expect free support. It's in the best interests of the project to have more people use it.

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Re:If you want to learn Lisp, be ready to meet the scowling ... by machine on Thursday June 21, 2007 @03:31AM (#29770)

I understand that it is in the best interests of an open source developer to give support for his software (assuming he wants people to use it), but he's in no way obligated to do so. Some people just develop software for fun and make it available to the public as an afterthought in the hopes like minded people will find it useful. I know with the personal projects I've released as open source, although I fixed bugs and responded to requests when I could, it was my goal to give prompt technical support.

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Re:If you want to learn Lisp, be ready to meet the scowling ... by omouse on Thursday June 21, 2007 @11:49AM (#29843)

Some people just develop software for fun and make it available to the public as an afterthought in the hopes like minded people will find it useful.

That's true. But this is a programming language we're talking about. The goal is to create a good implementation and part of that is having good support. Does a programming language exist if no one uses it?

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