>>1
What happened to us, /prog/?
As I understand it, the rough sequence of events is this:
* Paul Graham creates Y Combinator to fund tech startups, a lot of tech people and wannabees are interested and get exposed to his ideas about Lisp superiority. PG creates hackernews and funds Reddit which further spreads the message to unwashed masses who dream about becoming programmers one day.
* A lot of impressionable idiots believe PG's bullshit and begin proselytizing (the only thing Lisp is good for). The smell of easy food attracts lots of trolls, and more trolls trolling trolls. This is the heyday of
/prague/.
* 6.001 and other MIT CS courses switch to Python, Reddit is rewritten in Python in a single weekend, no other Y Combinator startups even consider using Lisp, so whatever modicum of interest actual engineers had in it is lost, they stop talking about it and the stream of wannabe idiots gradually dries up. Existing idiots grow up or are trolled into submission, new arrivals immediately burn up in the atmosphere produced by several years of intense trolling.
* Trolls realize that the food has left and all emotions they seem to provoke are in fact faked by other trolls, so they lose interest as well.