Re: Justify introducing Lua at my workplace?

[<dg@...>]

Don Hopkins wrote:
[...]
> Yeah, and Larry Craig is not gay, or so he says, again and again.

I have no idea who that is.

[...]
> "A gay lisp is actually not a lisp but refers to stereotypical speech
> attributes assigned to and sometimes heard in gay males.

I have never heard of this.

[...]
> If
> you had come up with some valid criticisms of Lisp, I wouldn't have
> brought up homophobia and cognitive dissonance. But you trotted out
> that tired old "too many parenthesis" argument on your own.

You are very focused on homosexuality, disturbingly so to my mind.

The thing is, among programmers, any cognitive dissonance would actually 
work the other way round. Lisp the language is the dominant concept; lisping 
is such an irrelevant concept that it's never even thought about. I've just 
asked a few random people what the first thing they thought about when I 
said the word 'lisp' to them was. Okay, this is purely anecdotal and does 
not count as real data, but the results were:

"Brackets." "Emacs." "A programming language." "That brackety thing." 
"Snakes." (That last from Bill the sysadmin. Sigh.)

Notice that "speech impediment" does not appear in that list. If you asked a 
programmer type to describe someone who did lisp, they'd probably wouldn't 
use the word --- because to them, the primary meaning was something else 
entirely.

Me, I can't stand Lisp for much the same reason that most people I know 
can't stand it --- too many parentheses. The syntax and programming style is 
way too free-form for me. I don't like the prefix syntax, I don't like the 
way that coming up with a consistent indentation style is an exercise in 
frustration, I don't like the way all identifiers are usually in lower case. 
It simply doesn't work the way I want to work.

But, the reason it doesn't work the way I want to work is simply because 
I've been trained to work in another way. I grew up with C and Pascal and 
Haskell. If I'd grown up with Emacs and Scheme and Lisp instead, I'd work 
differently; perhaps, more effectively, but it's too late now. I could 
retrain, but frankly if I were going to go to that effort I'd pick a 
radically different language like ML or Prolog.

When I think about Lisp, I associate it with mystique and the MIT hacker 
culture and Lisp Machines and Emacs and information technology theory and 
deep programming magic. I don't think about gay people. Statements like 
this:

> Well if you're not homophobic, then why are you spreading FUD about
> Lisp? The "too many parenthesis" argument is ridiculous!

...deeply bewilder me; there's simply no logical connectivity between the 
concepts you're talking about. You might as well try to link global warming 
to the worldwide decrease in piracy.

In fact, and with all due respect, you sound like a loon. If been knocking 
around the 'net for a long time now, and I'm afraid that you're showing all 
the symptoms: your primary thesis ('cognitive dissonance') is so subjective 
that it cannot be proven or disproven; you continually explain yourself by 
making logical jumps that nobody else can follow; and you're constantly 
using deprecating language to refer to people who disagree with you. You may 
not be a loon, of course. But I'm afraid you really do sound like one.

--
David Given
dg@cowlark.com