LispCast

I've been disturbed recently by comments I've read saying that if people can't learn to install an implementation of Common Lisp and get some packages working, they probably don't have what it takes to learn the language. There's also complaining about people complaining.

This is snobbery pure and simple.

And it's disturbing. And its endemic in the Common Lisp community. Yeah, I know that it's not everybody's job to sit around helping people learn something eminently worth learning. Oh, wait. Maybe it is. Maybe it is your duty to use what we've learned to help others. To spread knowledge. To frickin' help people.

Teaching requires patience. So does learning. Sometimes people say something hastily when they're frustrated. Sometimes people get defensive of something they care about and react badly. It's important to look past the seemingly negative remarks. It's so easy to be misunderstood online.

And what do you get out of teaching? You get more knowledgeable people using your language. You get more libraries. More minds developing the implementation. More press. More nice people to talk to. That's what you get!

The problem with being elitist about the language is that it only attracts more elitists. If you sell the language to snobs, snobs are going to flock to it. If you flaunt your snobbery, other snobs will smell it and drop by. And they might not leave.

We have a lot of people in the Lisp community trying to help each other. That's the basis of a community. People are developing libraries, implementations, and documentation. It's a lot of work---hard work---and they're doing a good job. It's a relatively small community with lots to do. It's only natural that not all of it is going to get done.

But shunning people because they vent frustration (which everyone has experienced) is not the message I see people communicating all the time through helpful advice, thorough tutorials, and useful libraries. Lisp has always been a language of easy starts (bootstrapped), easy development (incremental dev in the REPL), easy learning (doc strings), easy change (dynamic recompilation), and easy debugging. Unless all of those easies are unimportant, why not add easy download, easy install, and easy going?