Clearly the post is half-nonsense, but I can say this as someone who went through the same process of falling in love with this language and being at first disappointed about the lack of a "big movement" in this community.
However, what I would be interested in is why this does yield such a strong reaction an your side?
@louis Because it's ten years of seeing the same shit over and over again and it never yields anything but a buncha folks making the same tired old arguments.
@shinmera@louis that current of complaining and gnashing of teeth was there around the turn of the century to. Sounds like there has been some progress tho, not complaining about parenthesis anymore?
@craigbro@louis That's still well around and alive, too, I'm afraid. Just less so on the actual community places, but even there fexprs and whatever other nonsense comes up frequently enough.
@shinmera@craigbro I completely understand the frustration, especially from one who is as engaged in the community as you are with hundreds of contributions of great value.
However, I think for newbies popping in, they have to learn that humility towards the hard-earned achievements of the CL circle is a very much required capability to get in touch at all. Then there is the added confusion about Lisp != Common Lisp.
That is not obvious for everyone, since it is very much not required by other contemporary corporate driven "language communities" (using this for the lack of a better word).
In the CL world, there are none whatsoever missionary efforts. You have to discover it entirely for yourself. Also not a property widespread among programmers anymore.
Maybe the CL foundation could create a FAQ page that addresses many of these ever occurring questions so one can just refer people there when questions like this are posted on public spaces.
Python has the notion that "there should be one obvious way to do something". Of course, it doesn't go that way in practice, but it's a helpful ideal.
In lisp there are so many ways of accomplishing the same thing, that it is quite overwhelming to newcomers. An opinionated guide would be very helpful.
Even re: interpreter, if you said: "just start with sbcl, and consider x, y, and z if you want these features", it would at least allow newcomers to start somewhere.
Here's the closest thing I know of for emacs lisp:
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