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From his 'On LISP' review:

...In Graham's prose, like his code, every word counts...

Fascinating to read Peter Norvig describe ten years ago what most people tend to say about pg's essays and general writing style.




Somebody should show this to people in #lisp. They uniformly worship Norvig and hate PG.


Hero worship is sadly not transitive.


The reason is that "hero worship" is what "respect" looks like when it is done by idiots.


What are the complaints against pg?


My gut feeling is that it has something to do with Arc. Some people tends to think it's just a regular Lisp with shorter keywords and that there's nothing really innovative in it. The problem is that pg kept the code private for too long while advocating publicly the power of the language and criticizing Common Lisp.

So when he finally released it, some lispers were disappointed because they've been waiting for something really disruptive. And it backfired as most of the time, the harshest critics comes from your disappointed sympathizers.

That being said, I don't hang that much on IRC so I have no real back-story supporting this.


It started long before PG released Arc.

My theory is that because most of those people are very intelligent yet utterly ineffectual, they act as a kind of support group for one another. They view Lisp as a monastic order where in order to keep the tradition alive, one is forced by the circumstances to give up all his worldly ambitions. PG didn't buy it, and succeeded. So to keep the ideology consistent, you need to introduce the assumption that PG is not a "true" Lisper.


Searching for "Emo Phillips die heretic", besides amusing, may be enlightening.

(Just an educated guess about the root of the problem, I have no idea of what goes on in IRC.)


PG doesn't actually like Common Lisp, which is what #lisp is dedicated to.




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