All the CL people I've worked with have been amiable. Though, I suppose you could say: what high-powered hacker wouldn't be in a good mood, if they were getting paid to hack Lisp.
I don't recall any curmudgeon behavior in-person, but a bit "critical" is often a useful role for an engineer to play, if they can back it up and discuss. A useful mode of engineering discussion involves people making assertions, thinking aloud, and being challenged, and together you improve the ideas and generate new ideas. Sometimes it's appropriate to suddenly look at each other and start jumping up and down and shouting, like you're in a movie, because you've just hit on a solution that has passed your preliminary tests of critical thinking. If you're jumping up and down all the time, I suppose that could turn into incestuous amplification.
The Scheme and Racket communities are also good. I've spent the most time in Racket, and have a few ideas about why the community is good:
* The original professor (Matthias Felleisen) and grad students were solid PL people who were interested in making CS education more accessible, which seems like a pursuit that would value nurturing and accessibility.[1] When some of the grad students also became professors working with Racket, they kept up accessibility, such as in the main forum (`racket-users` email list / Google Group). (`racket-users` seems to implicitly coordinate, with community members, including the professors, responding to most any question.)
* This will sound a bit cynical or funny, but I've seen it change other language communities before: one thing that helps the community be good is that there's no money in it. (Once there's money happening, you'll get more of less-desirable behavior from some individuals and groups: promotion of personal brands, posturing and jockeying for the opportunities, SEO games and huge amounts of Web search hit noise from that, marketing puffery rather than engineering straight-talk, non-sharing, sometimes commercial landgrab games with the platform itself, sunny-sociopath workplace cultures, etc. Not that a community can't be great even when there's money involved, but "really, there's no money in this -- it's only for the merits and community" seems to scare away a lot of behavior, and the people who are attracted anyway set a tone.)[2]
* Racket is one of those tools that many hackers really like to use, and people generally have good morale when using it.
[1] You also saw this with the SICP professors, who are some of the best-regarded.
[2] Not that I haven't tried to promote commercial use of Racket, despite fear of spoiling a good thing. One of my attempts, I tried to do it while shaking up some usual expectations/modes: https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-money/
I don't recall any curmudgeon behavior in-person, but a bit "critical" is often a useful role for an engineer to play, if they can back it up and discuss. A useful mode of engineering discussion involves people making assertions, thinking aloud, and being challenged, and together you improve the ideas and generate new ideas. Sometimes it's appropriate to suddenly look at each other and start jumping up and down and shouting, like you're in a movie, because you've just hit on a solution that has passed your preliminary tests of critical thinking. If you're jumping up and down all the time, I suppose that could turn into incestuous amplification.
The Scheme and Racket communities are also good. I've spent the most time in Racket, and have a few ideas about why the community is good:
* The original professor (Matthias Felleisen) and grad students were solid PL people who were interested in making CS education more accessible, which seems like a pursuit that would value nurturing and accessibility.[1] When some of the grad students also became professors working with Racket, they kept up accessibility, such as in the main forum (`racket-users` email list / Google Group). (`racket-users` seems to implicitly coordinate, with community members, including the professors, responding to most any question.)
* This will sound a bit cynical or funny, but I've seen it change other language communities before: one thing that helps the community be good is that there's no money in it. (Once there's money happening, you'll get more of less-desirable behavior from some individuals and groups: promotion of personal brands, posturing and jockeying for the opportunities, SEO games and huge amounts of Web search hit noise from that, marketing puffery rather than engineering straight-talk, non-sharing, sometimes commercial landgrab games with the platform itself, sunny-sociopath workplace cultures, etc. Not that a community can't be great even when there's money involved, but "really, there's no money in this -- it's only for the merits and community" seems to scare away a lot of behavior, and the people who are attracted anyway set a tone.)[2]
* Racket is one of those tools that many hackers really like to use, and people generally have good morale when using it.
[1] You also saw this with the SICP professors, who are some of the best-regarded.
[2] Not that I haven't tried to promote commercial use of Racket, despite fear of spoiling a good thing. One of my attempts, I tried to do it while shaking up some usual expectations/modes: https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-money/