Toe nail clippings

“ "You are in a maze of little twisty format directives, all different." "You are in a twisty maze of little format directives, all different." "You are in a little maze of twisty format directives, all different."... ”

Reposted from silenius

“

<Guthur> anyone know what sort of proof one needs to provide of being a student for ELS?

<Xach> Write LISP in all caps, ask for help with implementing "flatten"

”

Reposted from antifuchs

“ Absolutely do *not* place closing brackets on their own lines.
Rationale: The parentheses grow lonely if their closing brackets are all kept separated and segregated. ”

Reposted from silenius

“ [...] Simply, I realised that no matter how much time, effort, work or money is plunged into free software (in fairness, this is unlikely to be unique to Lisp) the response from this "new user" market is always going to be "Sucks.  Is there even any desire on anyone's part to improve the situation?". Anything you did more than three weeks ago when they started looking at lisp is taken for granted, assumed to be provided by some capricious god in Days of Old and now just part of the natural state of things.

So, no, as far as I'm concerned, there isn't any such desire.  These days I write code because (and when) I enjoy it and I think it'll be useful to me or to my fellow hackers; if I decide I'd enjoy something else more, I'll do that instead.  The new users can go and fuck themselves.  Or they can attempt to set up their Lisp systems using only tools and libraries that were available in 1998 and see how they get on.  Good luck guys; I hear that CMUCL has just gained an x86 backend, so you might be able to get it running on Linux.  You may need to crosscompile from Alpha, though. ”

Reposted from luismbo