Found it: Dan Weinreb’s blog September 18th, 2008 http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-failure-of-lisp-a-reply-to-brandon-werner :

I am distressed and sad to hear that the community is judgmental and unfriendly to newcomers and thorny and un-inspiring. I have heard this same criticism from other people than you, and at this point I assume it must really be true. My own point of view is, of course, entirely different from that of newcomers, so it’s probably harder for me to see that this is going on. Indeed, to me it seems that people do get answers on comp.lang.lisp and LispForum, and the tone doesn’t seem so nasty to me, usually. Maybe I’m just not “getting it”.

A friend’s blog ( http://erehweb.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/gold-and-intrinsic-value/ ) found a similarly amusing quote on a different topic:

President Ulysses S. Grant:

“A noun is the name of a thing,” which I had also heard my Georgetown teachers repeat until I had come to believe it.

I was trying (and failed) to find the article where one of the fathers of Lisp admitted (using some beautiful language like “I don’t believe this myself, but so many people have told me this I must accept it is true”) that he felt one of the reasons Lisp is being outcompeted by its newer and weaker rivals (Python, Ruby, Arc) was that the Lisp community was rude to beginners. The fact that they were responding curtly to the ill-formed questions formed by beginners had the effect of chasing away beginners (and without beginners you eventually have nobody left).

Please consider an alternative Tip 8 for using the r-help list:
Read the Posting Guide first, and then post reproducible code with a clear specification of the desired result.

–
David.

> data(Chem97,package=’mlmRev’)
> subset(Chem97,score %in% c(0,10))

zoo and xts are now fairly standard for complex timeseries. True, many core functions still operate on ts objects. The conversion doesnt involve the Prince, though!

Are you sure about xts and arima? Xts is a superset of zoo. and documentation indicates that ***zooregs*** work with arima and brethren with no loss of information. See p6 & 7 of current zoo docs here (obtained via rseek.org, nice tip!) http://r-forge.r-project.org/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/*checkout*/trunk/inst/doc/zoo.pdf?rev=134&root=zoo

0. No whinging before reading upper-level documentation. I agree that function help pages can be confusing at first, and that many packages lack vignettes and overview explanations. Still, there are 20 years of books for learning the *language* (counting S), and many very readable books have emerged lately (e.g. Lattice). I consider these, along with great online resources like http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/spoetry.html to be the “M” in that venerably cry of “RTFM”.

Another site I find helpful:
http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/

print.default() is another way to print objects without using methods.

Tip 8: Grow thicker skin to withstand the abuse you will receive when posting to r-help.

map=new.env(hash=T,parent=emptyenv())

You’ll see why this is needed by running

get(”map”,envir=map)

on your first construction.

map get(“map”,envir=map)