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03/17/2005: "Geeks -n- guns"

Just ran across this via some random Lisp-site. Its Olin Shivers, one of the big Scheme/T proponents/nutjobs, (still at it too, see: this Read:Scheme entry and be sure to read both "History of T", and Rees's rebuttal) responding to Jordan K. Hubbard, then moderator of rec.guns, though he now manages the Unix group at Apple, after passing through the FreeBSD project for a number of years.

Yes, I am aware of the West Coast predilection for 9mm pistolry. When I was
an undergraduate, I spent one summer doing AI hacking at the MIT AI Lab. We'd
hired this west coast guy to do Lisp hacking, and I can clearly remember being
a little stranged out by his attitudes. He just wouldn't shut up about
Interlisp and Browning Hi-Power's. Every time I tried to explain to him the
way our project did things, he'd interrupt with "the right way,"
i.e. the West Coast Way, to do it. He just couldn't get it through his head that I didn't
want to hear about Interlisp, and I damn sure didn't want to hear about
9-fucking-millimeter automatics; we were a Zetalisp/.223 project. I finally
gave up on him; that was the first time I'd ever personally encountered the
east coast/west coast split in Lisp style and weapons choice.

And I swear-to-God-its-true, while I was typing this, (at 4:20am in a hotel room in San Diego), iTunes shuffled up Steely Dan's "Third World Man":

Johnny's playroom
Is a bunker filled with sand
He's become a third world man

Smoky Sunday
He's been mobilized since dawn
Now he's crouching on the lawn
He's a third world man