I think you're right about those mundane reasons, but the community can be a major turnoff too. Try posting a stupid question[0] on comp.lang.lisp - you'll almost certainly get flamed, and maybe get harmful responses[1]. Try the same on comp.lang.ruby or comp.lang.python and you might get some gentle correction, but not outright hostility.
[0] A stupid question would be anything you can find out by searching google, reading the manual or possibly digging through a few thousand lines of source code.
Example [1] was just an individual nutter. It gets used over and over to show that Lisp newsgroups are mean. One sign they're not is that people have to keep re-using that one example instead of finding the new ones that should in theory be very common. From what I've seen, people on Lisp newsgroups are much like on any other.
I just went looking for recent examples to prove my point and found none. Perhaps my memory of CLL is inaccurate, or it has become more friendly recently.
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I think you're right about those mundane reasons, but the community can be a major turnoff too. Try posting a stupid question[0] on comp.lang.lisp - you'll almost certainly get flamed, and maybe get harmful responses[1]. Try the same on comp.lang.ruby or comp.lang.python and you might get some gentle correction, but not outright hostility.
[0] A stupid question would be anything you can find out by searching google, reading the manual or possibly digging through a few thousand lines of source code.
[1] http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/4c95766a8b...
Example [1] was just an individual nutter. It gets used over and over to show that Lisp newsgroups are mean. One sign they're not is that people have to keep re-using that one example instead of finding the new ones that should in theory be very common. From what I've seen, people on Lisp newsgroups are much like on any other.
I just went looking for recent examples to prove my point and found none. Perhaps my memory of CLL is inaccurate, or it has become more friendly recently.