Thanks Dave,

I hope to find some help getting started with Lisp, because I **really** like this langage.
 

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I think lispforum should be written in lisp.
 

While a good idea at first glance, I wonder if the lisp community really needs to be split up again.

If c.l.l isn't to your liking, go ahead and post things of your liking and reply to messages in the spirit you want to perpetuate.
 

I am not too enthused about this, particularly when some of the forum topics already have *several* mailing lists devoted to them.

This means more places to monitor to keep a handle on issues.

Consider eg. Slime hackers: if they don't choose to monitor the Slime & Emacs forum, then the people talking about Slime there are missing out the expert advice, and the hackers will not learn about the problems people may be having. I don't see any benefit over slime-devel here.

Now, I don't dispute that it can be useful to have a medium or few in addition to cll and current mailing lists, but I would urge you to *at least* reconsider forums that essentially duplicate the topics of existing mailing lists -- that is, all implementation forums, and the Slime forum.

Maybe I am just missing the point, but I think less is more here.
 

Andreas and Nikodemus, I hear you on splitting things or providing yet-another-channel for information flow and to be monitored. The reason I did this was based on some real-world experience we got at Vyatta, the open source company that I work for now. We started off with a set of mailing lists, but found that participation jumped substantially when we started using forums. Simply, they were far more accessible to most people. While I think that old-line developers have no problem with mailing lists, many users just don't like them.

That said, there are people that hate forums, too. I'm not claiming that forums will solve the Lisp community's version of world hunger.

As for the forum topics duplicating the topics of several mailing lists, there is actually a benefit to that. I wanted to provide a bit of one-stop shopping for people and help get some cross-pollination between subgroups as well. By having everything available in one place, I think we'll actually see better participation.

Note that this was not necessarily intended to replace the Slime or SBCL developer's mailing lists. Things like patches are better exchanged in that medisum.
 

stassats said: I think lispforum should be written in lisp.

Yea, that would have been great, but I'm not really into duplicating good functionality in another language just for the heck of it. From an admin point of view, phpBB is well-known, provides great functionality out of the box, and runs well on the meager shared hosting account on which I set all this up. If there is no benefit to me as an admin and users wouldn't have seen a difference, I'd rather get on with it and talk about Lisp. Put another way, while I love Lisp, it's not the One True Programming Language in my life. People have used other languages to write great software (phpBB being a good example), and I'm okay with that. That's a totally different consideration to what language I myself might use if I started writing a forum system from scratch.
 

Maybe it's an age or cultural thing, but I _despise_ forums. Just glancing at yours for one second made my skin crawl. They're busy, they're ugly, each is different from all the others (so that even if I know how to use one, that doesn't mean I know how to use another).
Mailing lists and newsgroups were good enough for my Grandaddy, and by gum, they're good enough for me!
 

offby1 said: Maybe it's an age or cultural thing, but I _despise_ forums. Just glancing at yours for one second made my skin crawl. They're busy, they're ugly, each is different from all the others (so that even if I know how to use one, that doesn't mean I know how to use another).
Mailing lists and newsgroups were good enough for my Grandaddy, and by gum, they're good enough for me!

Well, I guess we won't be seeing you hang out with us Like I said in previous responses, the goal here wasn't to solve world hunger, just provide an option for those who don't agree with you. You and your Granddaddy can continue to hang out on comp.lang.lisp. I might even wander by every now and then myself. ;-)
 

Dave Roberts:

Yes, I fully understand and agree with your point. But, it will attract more newcomers to lisp, however not well-written will repel.
 

You could do a lot of good by rewriting the forum software in Lisp: you could provide for a sensible interface! I have to agree with offby1: web forums are just unusably bad - compared to NNTP or mailing lists from 20+ years ago, web forums feel like stepping back into the dark ages. At the very least, I need proper threading and non-display of the messages that I've already read; preferably add an NNTP or play-by-mail interface as well.