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What's a not-that-terrible way to echo Steele's remarks in The Evolution of that people use lisp because of our (in-arguably correct) perception that lisp is clearly the best, what Steele refers to as lisp's cachet.

I was also remembering <error>'s sometime remark that part of what keeps lisp great is the verdant mulch of people who really think lisp is the best doing their best to be the best, but they're actually mostly pretty nuts. I think it's important to be those people basically.

@screwtape can't say I remember saying this, sorry

@hayley
Eh, do you ever delete things from your phlog? I can try and find it.

@hayley sorry for putting words into your mouth anyway. I was pretty sure I remembered it but didn't have a link prepared.

@hayley
Fwiw, your words were
"
the "lone wolves" of Lisp work as metaphorical compost: they are dead, and they smell funny, but they help produce better projects
"
applied-langua.ge/posts/lisp-c

The Lisp "Curse" Redemption Arc, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The CONSapplied-langua.ge
@screwtape lol I see the compost/mulch part, but "people who really think Lisp is the best ..." and so on I don't see?

I don't delete things though

@hayley oh, I left out a really key part of that sentence.

The half-done projects produced by the "lone wolves"

I guess the lone wolves themselves aren't dead and have more of a sophisticated fish smell.

@screwtape @hayley I think it's problematic to suggest that Lisp attracts a certain type of person and not that Lisp empowers people to do things on their own. The reason being that I am beginning to hate programmer ego and superiority complexes.
@screwtape @hayley The lisp curse redemption arc probably needs revisiting, but meh. Scanning over both now, I wonder if the curse can be dismissed in a simpler way. If it really were true that less expressive languages force cooperation to get anything, and it was true that all you get from lisp programmers is shit. Then there still would be a very good reason to work together beyond that it's no longer very hard not to (which is to avoid shit).

But outside of that, the whole thing is kinda bullshit. I know already that people will make their own versions of things in any language just because they want to do things their way. In fact people will refuse to participate in a project and then attempt to rewrite it in an entirely new language for what feels like bullshit reasons when it happens to you. Can you make some kind of weird moral argument about how it'd be better to work together? Yeah, you could. Are they going to care? No lol. Does it actually matter? Not really.

People work collaboratively in ecosystems of code all the time without much communication. People are making libraries, packaging applications, hell even changing the programming languages themselves. I'm not in a slack channel with all of these people where I need to veto their work because if they do it they will wreck my project. Like you would be if you were co-maintainers and they were about to merge a PR without asking.

I don't really know the concrete reasons why we have this now, (it maybe didn't always exist and I imagine people probably used to NIH the hell out of everything before the internet). But if you can allow people to work independently of each other and still build up to something bigger than that's great. And that's what programming languages should enable you to do. npm is fantastic.
screwlisp

@Gnuxie
Mmm, so my proximal thought that dragged me into this was reconciling clojure-style transducers with Waters' Series (in the curse, the comparison is lisp Series and Haskell). I wanted lisp to have the-best-thing, and it was unclear to me what that meant. Maybe wanting other people to agree with me or wanting to agree with others about what the-best-thing is is the mistake.

One product of the flame wars was that Series, generators and gatherers did become friends, eventually.
@hayley