Lambda the Ultimate

that it's ok to post stuff that turns out to be completely stupid as long as you learn from it (this one's in my defense ;o)

that the number of people who post is small, so you may not get any replies, independent of whether what you said was interesting or not.

that more contributions would be welcome.

(i'm on summer vacn and feeling mellow, but i think most people here would agree to those)

1. Only editors can post to the home page. Anyone who signs up can post to the discussion group.

2. Discussion group items don't belong to a category/department (like LC, OOP etc.). Only home page posts do.

There are two basic views availabe: by topic (or thread), and a chronological list of individual messages. The latter is better if you check the site often, and only want to read new messages posted since you last checked the site.

Using the discussion group RSS feed in a news aggregator is another option.

If you're responding to a specific post that is not the top message in a thread, do not do it in the "mode=topic" page. (That's the version with a URL that ends like "message11054.html#11086", and whose display generally has a bunch of messages, with headers that have blue backgrounds.) Instead, click on the message's Frontier cow-skull icon, which puts you into a misleadingly-named "mode=day"; that will allow Frontier (and the rest of us) to understand what message you are responding to.

It seems so, but I don't think this is the reason. I think many people simply read the discussion group using the default view, or view entire threas by clicking on the links from home page entries.

Perhaps adding a 'daily view' link to the navigation menu on the left would be a good idea.

The other one is a workflow issue, exacerbated by the often poor performance of the site, and worst for those with only dial-up access. Here's my "work"flow: I go to the site via a bookmark to here:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org

and I see ten or twenty new messages in five or six new topics or in discussion topics continued from previous days. I then click-click-click (actually, control-click) in order to open each of the five new discussion topics in the background, in its own new tab (i.e., I do not yet touch later messages with the same subject line). Then go through each tab and click on the "Msg#" link, which opens each discussion, pointing at the first message that I hadn't yet seen. Now, I can read each discussion in context, without further interactions with my slow (phone) link or the slow (server) site. And during much of the waiting that this process can entail, I can read some of the stuff that already arrived.

Anyway, with this scenario, replying to a specific messages always involves that extra cow-head click, which we often simply forget to do.

Start posting if and when you feel you want to.

No, it's because it often takes so long to open another page. I usually try to be explicit who I'm replying to by quoting and naming them, as above.

We usually use italics for quotes.

Using html pre tags allows you to insert code, the easy way...

OK gang, is that all? I expected more...what about subjective matters: "Does LtU have a bias?"

Appreciated Ehud.

Perhaps the question "Is this a Lisp board?" is apropos. That is a very frequently asked question.

It is fair to say that LtU has a mild functional programming bias, which is OK.

If regulars would like to post self-portraits, those could go into the FAQ. That would be a blurb communicating your experience with various languages, industry/academic background, likes and dislikes, relevant LtU posts, homepage. Some folks have a home page already so a mere link would suffice. Still it might be curious to know who are the most frequent and/or long-standing LtU regulars. I am not sure how to compile that data.

you can also play around with the url to read early messages.

strange. patrick doyle's the third person to post, as far as i can tell, but he has a user no of 221. oleg's in there at 3 and chris at 4 (i think chris posts before oleg though).

for most frequent posters maybe you can use google. isaac and frank seem to be the most frequent after ehud, then chris and me, but that's just going through the first 10 or so members - later members may have posted more (apologies for not going through all the people who post at the moment).

i'm trying to work out how i found this place. it doesn't seem to have been via a comp.lang.functional/misc announcement. how was it first announced?

[i'm proud to see the first post of mine mentioned oz/mozart!]

I am not sure this is reallyt appropriate for FAQ. What do others think?

on the other hand, if it were my site - which it's not, so i debated posting this - and if i was looking for help, i'd by pretty generous in accepting things with as few questions as possible from anyone good enough to volunteer.

That was my point.

andrew: i'm trying to work out how i found this place. it doesn't seem to have been via a comp.lang.functional/misc announcement. how was it first announced?

Ehud could you provide an authoritative answer to the provenance of the name "Lambda the Ultimate" (...imperative I suppose...paper citation URL please?).