He's responding to Xah Lee, well known to be one of the most abrasive and unpleasant people in the lisp community. The hostility might not be desired but it was certainly earned.
Xah Lee wasn't a part of the Lisp community. He was a Usenet troll, active in several programming related newsgroups, not just comp.lang.lisp. He had never written a line of Lisp (or anything more challenging) and never contributed anything, during his Usenet times. His effect on these newsgroups was extremely negative. Discussing with him was useless. Erik Naggum tried and failed (as others did). Erik was a part of the Lisp community, but unfortunately also with negative behavior, especially on comp.lang.lisp. He could write long&useful explanations, but discussions with him were often not pleasant.
Those pages usually just say "Something went wrong. Try reloading."
After several reloads, I was able to see that the second one said, "lol, this [redacted] lispm [redacted] is badmouthing me again," the third one was basically a link to http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/hackernews_lispm.html, and the first one was a repost of some of the (extremely abrasive and unpleasant) text on that page.†
On his page about Naggum, which is linked from the above, he writes:
> During 1998 to 2004 when i read comp.lang.lisp mostly of his posts, i also post maybe a couple a month on average. Most of my posts are trolls (of the good sort (see: Netiquette Anthropology.)), and part of it is riding his name, criticizing or making fun of his attackers, and criticizing or lampoon him too. They are mostly not technical. Most are writing exercises too.
This does clearly demonstrate that the characterization in this thread of Xah Lee as abrasive, unpleasant, and a Usenet troll is correct.
Of course line counts measure effort (the cost) rather than any measure of actual user benefit. But I think we can fairly say that Xah has by now put more effort into writing code for the Lisp community than Naggum did in his lifetime.
† Personal conflicts between lispm and Xah go back many years. http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/scheme_fail.html is one of numerous places where Xah personally attacked lispm, in this case because of a factual disagreement about the historical dynamics of programming language adoption.
> However, it also appears that lispm's characterization of Xah as never having written a line of Lisp hasn't been correct for many years.
Read again what I wrote above: "He had never written a line of Lisp (or anything more challenging) and never contributed anything, during his Usenet times." The "during his Usenet times" applies to both parts. People often asked on something like comp.lang.lisp for programming help, I can't remember that he actually wrote solutions or debugged problems (unlike, for example, Erik Naggum, who was providing his expertise). All I ever saw was him derailing discussions about the language.
Later then he was configuring GNU Emacs keybindings. He was then, later, scripting GNU Emacs.
Sure he doesn't like to be reminded of his destructive role as one of the most active trolls in Usenet programming related newsgroups. The Usenet archives document this though and he has actually said that he was trolling back then.
It's a bit sad that you waste your time with this topic... That's the hole I was talking about. Get out of it.
With that qualification I think your criticism of Xah is correct, although it entails that debate and trolling don't constitute "contributing anything". That, in turn entails that Naggum's thousands of posts also don't constitute any sort of a "contribution", though of course the small amount of functionality he added to Emacs does. This is debatable, but I do believe it's correct.
It's puzzling to me that you responded to my comment, which quoted Xah saying that he was trolling back then, by saying, "The Usenet archives document this though and he has actually said that he was trolling back then." Possibly you didn't see that part of my comment; did I edit it in after you read it? Certainly I edited it in before you posted your comment, because my editing window for that comment closed 19 minutes before you posted yours. Were there other parts of the comment that you also didn't read?
I don't think he's stopped being a destructive troll, but without Naggum's enthusiastic collaboration he is much less effective. I'd like to say that the changes in the online environment over the last 20 years have reduced the damage that any single troll can do, but eight years ago a Twitter troll got himself elected President of the USA, and seems likely to do so again.
When you say "this topic", I'm not sure whether you mean "the history of Lisp"† or "the social dynamics of online communities", but in either case you can save your tears; both of those topics are fascinating and enormously rewarding to study. Your demand to "get out of it" is not appreciated—it is a breach of civility to elevate yourself above me in that fashion, as if I were your servant—and I will not comply with it.
I asked you a similar question attempting to clarify what you meant in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41760084, and I appreciate your slight clarification on that question here. I've put a lot of effort into attempting to understand your flames so that I can respond to the substance they have, but without your collaboration it's impossible.
______
† This gloss seems unlikely, because you've dedicated a lot of time studying this topic yourself.
It doesn't look like Xah was really trolling here, most of his responses are pretty polite. And he seems to indicate at this point in time he wasn't really familiar with lisp, so I'd venture to guess he wasn't nearly as prominent as he later became.
Most of the stuff I've seen has not been so polite, he's such a notorious hater. Still, it can be entertaining in a way, in small doses (I imagine I'd feel a bit different if I was forced to share a newsgroup commons for years), and such a critic can provide a good perspective once in a while. Even though he's still around I think of him as a character as much as Naggum was, even if they were very different in important ways. The world is richer from having more characters.
The other day I ran into a "gem" from Xah that just made me laugh at its expression. Willing to tank the karma/flag to reproduce:
① I fucking hate this motherfucking tech geeking hacker fucks who
leave dead links on the web and don't fucking care. What the fuck?
Aren't these elite, elegant, coding experts who always take perfection
in algorithm, code, style, language, etc?
I don't understand, how could they, have their home page dead?
I laughed again when some followup links to his site 404'd. It's not at all a fair attack, but man, sometimes I really hate dead links too...
I think he's hilarious, and at a time where a lot of programming pundits only pretend to be subversive and shameless, I welcome Xah's unflitered presentation of his opinions. He often makes a lot of good points, and I tend to find his stances on things thought-provoking even if I disagree with him.
