Is the Common Lisp community really still so dysfunctional? I notice your link there dates back to 2006. Surely communities can improve over 15 years..
I would say it has improved, but it very much hurts me to watch some conversations. Lots of passive aggressiveness and stubborn people stuck with these old habits.
im only an observer on redit (lisp and common lisp) and the community seems to be quite good and supportive. there are a few members who, while very helpful, can be somewhat terse, but thats only a minority. the latter might be a bit of a turn off to some people but ive personally grown above being easily offended. overall i would say its an enjoyable community with a lot of new prominent members doing some exciting things
The sense that the user community is toxic arises from two specific individuals, one in the early days of lisp, at MIT, who was so toxic that they created a whole email list (as it was in those days) whose name was explicitly “—-without-[ahole]—-“, and one more recently who was so toxic that he single-handedly drove everyone off comp.lang.lisp. The StackOverflow lisp community, such as it is, is much less toxic.
Yes, we’ll, it was a real problem, but it was really just caused by a tiny number of people, almost entirely two. One really bad apple ... and all that — two in this case, but separated by many years, so the feeling had barely calmed down before another one arose. It could have happened in any community. For some reason it happened in Lisp. Shrug. Also, you need to take into account that Lisp has been in active use for over half a century!! A couple aholes in 60 years isn’t that bad a record.