Mad people

of comp.lang.lisp
Why? As in other newsgroups, many of cll's mad people thrive on attention and, if responded to, argued with or otherwise fed and watered, will produce a nearly endless stream of articles which serve to enormously reduce the signal-to-noise ratio of the group. The only strategy that makes them go away is to ignore them. This list is an attempt to enumerate some of the worst offenders, so that newcomers can be referred here rather than engaging the lunatics as they might otherwise do.

This strategy of sending perceived mad people to Coventry is often regarded as some kind of arrogance or unwillingness to listen on the behalf of a self-selected `Lisp elite': however in the more than 10 years that I've read cll no one has been able to come up with any other strategy that works. Similar strategies are used on other newsgroups as well. There doesn't seem to be any evidence of actual elitism on cll - newbies who ask honest questions and listen to the answers they get are accepted with open arms - even when they point out the answers they get are sometimes wrong.

This list can obviously never be complete, and in any case is merely the opinion of one person. New entries are added at the start, and nothing is ever removed. People change their aliases from time to time, so some of the searches here may not match tall their articles, or may match articles by the wrong person. It's also possible that the same person has posted under different aliases so some of these people may actually be the same person.

I haven't made any attempt to be complete, and there are few new entries after the start of June, 2003.
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:

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.
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