[LispSea] the Lisp Questionnaire

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Daniel Pezely wrote:
> The main reason as to *why* to fill out the questionnaire is so that 
> it *does* become populated.

That's a nice thought but 2 years has proven it ain't happenin', at 
least not in the current guise.

>
> Also, there is a fairly new effort within the Lisp Gardeners to turn 
> that raw data into useful content.
>
> All the more reason to fill it out...

Not really.  It's worthless until the useful content is displayed.  
Pitching that people help fix / beef up the content display is a good 
idea.  Pitching that people fill out the form as it stands is a waste of 
time.  Frankly, the form *reinforces* the myth that nobody's doing 
Lisp.  If you take the Seattle promotion page seriously, I suggest you 
remove that "please fill this out" request, and instead point something 
at the "let's rearchitect this" request.

Let's get people to focus on what matters and not make ourselves look 
stupid and crappy in the interim.  The Gardeners page is ok.  The Common 
Lisp Directory is good.  The Questionnaire sucks. 

Side note: my God, www.python.org finally got a facelift!  That could 
have happened 2 years ago.  The resistance to that was very, very 
painful to deal with.  It's part of why I moved on to other programming 
languages.  I was on the marketing-python mailing list, helped get some 
draft logos together.  After that fiasco, went and tried to do the same 
thing with OCaml.  That didn't pan out either.  Tried to help get Lisp + 
Scheme logos organized several months ago.  It didn't work out.  I 
wonder how the logjam on www.python.org finally got broken open, because 
it was a big one.  I bet it took $$$$$$.  Their logo is even decent, 
relying on principles of abstraction we went over 2 years ago.  The idea 
was that realistic snakes freak too many people out, so we wanted snakes 
as an abstract graphical element only.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every