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.
