Programmers Blog

Smug Lisp Weenies and Lateral Thinking

Now, lateral thinking is generally recognized as a quality of smart people, so it is hardly exclusive to Lispers. But Lispers are infamous for being an insular community, not friendly to people wanting to approach the language from one blub or another and so it’s worth pursuing this topic a bit further.

I’d like to advance the following: the perceived unhelpfulness of Lispers is structural. It derives from the selection criteria operating on Lispers providing advice and “blubbers” looking for it. Here is why: Lispers are, generally, out of the box thinkers, or they wouldn’t be using Lisp¹. People asking for help on #lisp are 1) new to Lisp and 2) almost surely trying to get a particular thing done, right now. If they were voracious auto-didacts without a particular goal in mind, besides learning, they would likely be content to just figure out any questions themselves. Finally, Lisp is different, which means people coming from other programming languages will probably be laden with a lot of habits which don’t serve well in Lisp.

Read More:

http://dorophone.blogspot.com/2008/05/smug-lisp-weenies-and-lateral-thinking.html

Thanks