Mad people of comp.lang.lisp

Mad people	of comp.lang.lisp
Why?	Once upon a time I thought a list of disruptive posters would be a useful thing to have, as it would help people know when it wasn't useful getting into a discussion with someone. Well, that didn't work out, and I also stopped caring, so later on I occasionally maintained the list for my own amusement. I no longer read news, so this is really just a historical artifact now.

namekuseijin	From 2012, I think. Some kind of cohort of `WJ' perhaps, though it's unclear.
Ed Strolek	From early 2012. This may be the same person or machine as Cthun: certainly he/it shows some of the same repetitive aggression.
Cthun	From early 2011. Might not be a human based on some very formulaic & repetitive responses: if they are human they seem to be ill. Seems to have leaked in from some other group. May be the same as "Deeyana", and also someone who posts as "Seamus McRae"
Deeyana	Active from early 2011. A Clojure enthusiast who has probably done more damage to the language than any other individual. Splendidly unaware of both the history of Lisp-family languages and their own ignorance of it. Treats any disagreement as a personal attack. It may be age, but I find these people impossibly sad: what motivates them? what is missing from their lives that they have to strive so hard against some monster of their own imaginations? There are plenty of things which actually are wrong with CL, after all, but all they will succeed in doing is hardening attitudes. I suppose it is because they are mad. This person may be the same as "Cthun" above.
William James aka `WJ'	Active from 2009 perhaps. He is rather sad, really. His persona on cll seems to be defined by a hatred of Common Lisp: for a long time he used to post examples in a language he called "Matzlisp" which is, in fact, Ruby. More recently he has discovered Clojure and posts examples in that, together with occasional anti-CL tirades. In early 2011 he started digging out very old threads (in March 2012 the oldest being from 23 years ago!) in order to post responses in Clojure. As of early 2012 he is doing much the same but with examples in various other dialects such as NewLisp. It's hard not to feel sorry for him.
Madhu	I think he's been around for a while, and he's always been a bit left-field, but this thread is really something special. I guess perhaps he's a troll not mad.
Jon Harrop	Active from 2006. Not perhaps mad, but he definitely has something to sell you. A functional programming person who is also a Microsoft enthusiast: really impressive.
`Franz Kafka'	Arrived some time in early 2003. A LispM revivalist who doesn't even understand what they were. Has asked how CL-HTTP compares with Internet Explorer, and inevitably attacked the commercial vendors for charging too much.
Mark Conrad	Arrived some time in early 2003. He confesses to being a novice, but obsesses endlessly about continuations and `call/cc`, completely ignoring anything people say to him about why they might not be desirable. In some ways he's a classic Scheme-damaged person although he doesn't seem to want to use Scheme. He's also expressed interest in manually translating CL programs to C. A reasonable working hypothesis seems to be that anyone who has claims to prefer Scheme to CL, but posts on cll, is mad.
Ilias	Arrived on 10-Aug-2002 with some superficially plausible looking `newbie' questions. Communication rapidly deteriorated with the usual accusations of `hostility' or elite behaviour on the part of cll regulars. He soon started posting long tirades where he `proved' that the CL standard requires various behaviour, while completely ignoring the detailed rebuttals of his `proofs'. An example is the long series of articles where he `proves' that merely copying the syntax of `#\(` and `#\)` to, say `#\[` and `#\]` should cause `[ ... ]` to be legal syntax, despite multiple explanations by four or more people of why this cannot work. He has also a number of other strange ideas, mostly syntactic in nature - for instance he doesn't like the `.` in dotted-list syntax, and doesn't understand how the `,` unquoteing syntax works, and has argued, again, that the standard implies things that mean that no implementation is conforming. His articles involve a mixture of pseudo-logical reasoning from `first principles' without apparently referring to any implementation or consideration of what is implementationally possible, very poor English (he may be Greek although he has perhaps claimed to be German) and a complete unwillingness to listen to others. Any attempt to reason with him results in accusations of `hostility' or expressions of incomprehension. His articles are sufficiently hard to read that it is often very difficult to tell what he is saying. He is obsessed by the minutiae of syntax and apparently uninterested in actually writing programs - he needs to invent some `perfect' language before he can do anything, and he's starting with the syntax. It seems quite likely that he's just trying to avoid doing anything at all by endlessly fiddling with syntax. Like many cll people he also has various issues with pricing of the commercial Lisp products - for some reason he is apparently unable to use the free systems. Some particularly fine articles are: Admitting to not knowing about `macroexpand` after having posted a long series of articles on how the implementation of backquote syntax does not conform to the specification (this very article contains the statement that an implementation is not conforming); Asking people to explain why `(expt n 0)` is 1 in terms of subtracting apples. Ilias is currently (17-Sep-2002) being almost entirely ignored and is crying alone to himself, while trying to join in various threads. With luck if this continues he will get bored and wander off to annoy people in some other newsgroup. He is one of the most malignant posters to cll in recent history - between 27-Aug-2002 and 24-Sep-2002 threads begin by him were about 1/4 of the articles in cll. Ilias stopped posting to cll sometime in 2002, but has been recently (September 2003) reported in comp.lang.clipper, apparently as mad as ever.
Xah Lee	It's difficult to know if he's mad or not. He seems to be obsessed by maths, and he may even be a competent mathematician, although this isn't clear. He also writes curious poems and rants. He seems to have become madder over the years. If not actually mad, he's certainly a character. He doesn't post very frequently. He's taken to writing vast and superficially coherent diatribes explaining various supposed limitations of Lisp, for instance this huge thread on syntax. He almost immediatly resorts to abusing anyone who responds to him. It's not clear how well, if at all, he knows Lisp.
Arthur T Murray	No list of mad people would be complete without him. A long-time poster to several AI-related newsgroups, also posts under the name `Mentifex'. He encourages people to work on his `Mind.Lisp' or `Mind.forth' project to implement an AI in Lisp, Forth or some other language. He seems to be harmless, and does not post frequently. On 17-November-2002 he found this document and posted a link to several newsgroups. The black helicopters have already been dispatched, and the usenet neuralizer is about to be deployed. Please watch the screen closely and do not turn your computer off.
Tim Bradshaw	Another long-time cll poster. He claims to have written substantial commercial Lisp applications, but none has ever been seen - his self-professed expertise in Lisp is extremely doubtful. Vigorously denies belonging to a delusional `Lisp elite' of his own imagining. Many of his recent articles have been obscure and unfunny self-referential jokes, often at his own expense. He is probably mostly harmless, but does post frequently despite occasional self-imposed sabbaticals.