I think the general attitude of lispers is frequently a large turn off. There is a lot of elitism, but it is often a needy Mensa-like elitism. There is almost a hidden plea attached "please respect us as the smartest" and the problem is, of course, that they can't point to any tangible, quantifiable method for gauging intelligence with respect to a language. I guess PG's "let's see if anyone is using it in 50 years" is a good measure in some case, but that implies that lisp as a language is less of a "computer language" (e.g. a language that is made for making machines do what we humans want them to) and more of an artform or philosophical/mathematical depiction of some deeper truth obscured to normal people.

I think this is ultimately always a problem between ultra-smart people who live in something of an abstracted world that frequently approaches fantasy and the reality of industry, which generally doesn't care about how pretty something is unless someone will buy it because it is pretty. That's a pretty large gap, and, while in my opinion there is no need for arrogance, it is pretty clear why most of the smartest people in history end up on the former side of that divide. They want to contemplate some sort of eternal idea which usually they ascribe beauty to (e.g. Bohr, Einstein, etc.) -- and yet hackers, unlike theoretical physicists, are halfway between the people probing the mysteries of the universe and those putting together blueprints for the atom bomb.

In my opinion that's just life. Einstein hated the bomb and rightly so in my opinion -- but that doesn't mean that it was any less a necessity for the Manhattan project to go forward. The sad thing, however, is that lots of brilliant people trying to navigate this divide end up with a huge chip on their shoulder. PG talks about this in H&P; the jocks were popular and (surprise!) the nerds were not. So you go out and get a few million and say, "ha, screw the jocks." Fine, generally speaking I think that is a good idea, but let's not turn it into a wanker fest since there are lots of needed functions in the world that should probably be performed by those who can't understand Lisp -- and I don't just mean cleaning toilets, I mean politics.

Abstraction, which is really what lisp is about in many ways, is only ever IMO one pole. You have to zoom out to see the bigger picture and zoom in to address the minutia. Generally people miss the forest for the trees, so I have every sympathy for those who stick with the forest and ignore the trees. But when it comes down to it, someone has to re-write your code in blub to make a functional product (even true with Viaweb) so have some sympathy for the little man who has to do a sh't job, probably his mother never gave him fairy tales to read and he only vaguely knows who Godel, Escher, and Bach are. That's sad, but that's life and we who are Americans should especially expect it as an immigrant nation.

Anyways, I'm one who discovered Lisp rather late despite and not because of the Lisp community as it is usually presented. I think it is beautiful and esp. I think SICP is a fantastic book to introduce one to computer science concepts and I think that industry should serve great passions and ideas and not vice versa. Hell, I even think lisp machines are a great idea and hope someone builds new ones and they take over the world. But despite all of that, I would never hang out with "the Lisp community."

Why? I want to build great products. Great products need to scale. If you want to go to the moon you need a f'ing spaceship and not emacs and an open source notebook. Spaceships are big. They take a lot of people to run, and they have to be smart people. One mistake and you are smithereens at Cape Canaveral.

The thing that irks me the most about all of this whining is that America used to be capable of building automobiles and space shuttles and (omg!) computers. It was amazing. Now it is hello Taiwan, goodbye America. People talk about "Rework" and how they can't imagine being in a company with more than ten people and glorify the life of tribes in third world countries without contraception or toothpaste (or, in pg's case, the lifestyle of lions on the African prairie).

I know it may be nuts to say this, but I think we need to build cool stuff for the sake of building it, and that our tools should be our tools -- not some magic fairy dust. Use whatever works to solve the problem. Get your hands dirty. A parentheses is not a hammer if what you've got in front of you is a nail.

And if what you've got in front of you is a problem bigger and nastier than that, build a bigger and better tool. There's no problem that can't be solved if people put aside their differences and work together.