Comment by troad
20 days ago
Ah, so the issue is that you misperceive my genuine reflections to be trolling, which you take for permission to be unkind. Whereas from my perspective, I'm just sharing my reflections about something of interest to me, and find myself somewhat abruptly insulted.
Perhaps you ought identify less with your tools, you'd find yourself feeling less attacked when they're discussed (and attacking others?). There's an alternative version of this exchange where you contribute your Lisp knowledge in good faith and I benefit from your thoughts. Bit late now, but food for thought.
A synopsis of your "reflections" is that Lisp languages have nothing to offer of advantage, except to oddballs who follow weird practices that are incompatible with collaboration and long-term maintenance.
That's a baseless, misinformed attack on Lisp people, such as myself; if many people read and believe that, it becomes economically harmful.
Almost every capability in any Lisp dialect can be used responsibly, and in a way that a later maintainer will understand, due to good structure of the code, naming, documentation and other practices.
Respectfully, I wonder what my online experience would look like if I took to reading the thoughts of others with such a negative perceptual filter, and felt compelled to create a conflict in response to every point of difference that I automatically take to be a slight. It seems like it would fill my time with unnecessary strife, and result in a generally miserable time for me and others?
If I think someone is wrong, does that necessarily mean they're acting in bad faith, that they're an idiot, and I'm entitled to bully them? What if I'm mistaken? What if I'm not mistaken and they are in fact wrong - does that make such a reaction acceptable? Effective? Pleasant?
For me, this is a single unpleasant exchange that I get to leave behind, forget, and never think about again. For someone with the aforementioned negative perceptual filter, this is an unpleasant exchange they'll recreate and relive in different contexts, again, and again, and again. I find that kind of sad, honestly.
The irony here is that you're clearly quite experienced with Lisp, and had you responded instead with "hey! not quite - here's what you might be missing about how Lisp tends to be used in production... ", this would have been a very different exchange! But instead you chose to call me a lying idiot, which - well - I honestly can't picture anything positive ever coming out of that. Behaving like a bully automatically undercuts anything else you may have to say, which is a disservice to the experience you no doubt have to share. And even if you don't feel like sharing it, why choose to randomly start a conflict? If the goal was to defend Lisp's honour, is that an effective method? Is anyone reading this going to walk away thinking "My, what a lovely and welcoming community Lisp has, I should go check it out"?
I'm out, feel free to have the last word. Let's see if you use it to be mean or not.