[abrax3141]

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.

[eigenspace]

Oof. You know you have a real problem when StackOverflow is your less toxic community. At least that's my experience with StackOverflow

[abrax3141]

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.

[eigenspace]

Yes, sorry I was more taking a dig at StackOverflow there than anything. Was not in very good taste.