Comment by astrange

4 months ago

Having a long memory about this, the reason Lisp died out even though it was supposedly the best programming environment ever, is that Lisp programmers (called "Lisp weenies" at the time) were so unbelievably emotionally abusive that nobody believed them about it or wanted to interact with them. You couldn't ask them for help with anything without them calling you a moron who should kill yourself.

(The main example of these people was a guy named Erik Naggum, but a few still exist somewhere out there and I met one on a programming reddit yesterday. You can spot them because they won't stop telling you how great Lisp Machines are, can't explain why nobody uses them, and for some reason they insist on calling JavaScript "ECMAScript".)

That said, I also remember that codes of conduct were popularized about a decade ago by someone who was then fired from GitHub for harassing junior programmers (she claimed this was "mentoring" and seemed mentally incapable of noticing something could be wrong with her behavior.) So it seemed like an obvious case of reputation laundering at the time.

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astrange

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lelanthran  4 months ago

> Having a long memory about this, the reason Lisp died out even though it was supposedly the best programming environment ever, is that Lisp programmers (called "Lisp weenies" at the time) were so unbelievably emotionally abusive that nobody believed them about it or wanted to interact with them.

Agreed.

> You couldn't ask them for help with anything without them calling you a moron who should kill yourself.

Never got that, though. I hung out on comp.lang.lisp back in the day.

I recall once, writing a small utility to read a file in /etc/ and do $SOMETHING based on the settings therein. I asked about the best way to read ini/config files; did not mention /etc.

I got flamed for not storing my configs in s-expr and simply using the builtin reader ... needless to say I was never going to switch all the files in /etc to s-expressions.