Erik Naggum Quotes

What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.

When all actions are used for feedback, the consequence of making mistakes will be a corrective and appropriate response, because everything everybody does matters ... The more selective you are in the feedback you accept, the more insane your reasoning will become as you will necessarily reject corrective feedback that would have led to better reasoning.

It's not that Perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.

XML is a giant step in no direction at all.

Have you considered the option of getting the joke? If not, try it now and redeem your soul.

Contrary to the foolish notion that syntax is immaterial, people optimize the way they express themselves, and so express themselves differently with different syntaxes.

Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from sarcasm.

In C++, reinvention is its own reward.

Those who write software only for pay should go hurt some other field.

All experience has taught us that solving a complex problem uncovers hidden assumptions and ever more knowledge, trade-offs that we didn't anticipate but which can make the difference between meeting a deadline and going into research mode for a year, etc.

Ignoring for a moment the power of the American Medical Association, we still wouldn't see a huge amount of books on neurosurgery for dummies in 21 days or whatever. It's just plain inappropriate, and it's intentionally out of people's reach.

Life is too long to know C++ well.

Just getting something to work usually means writing reams of code fast, like a Stephen King novel, but making it maintainable and high-quality code that really expresses the ideas well, is like writing poetry. Art is taking away.

Norway did not even have a revolution at the time the rest of Europe was busy figuring out human rights and stuff, because we were busy fighting over how to spell it.

Suppose we blasted all politicians into space. Would the SETI project find even one of them?

We have no mom-and-pop oil rigs in Norway.

If, however, one factor is too successful, it will continue to be the winning factor regardless of the variation in the other factors over the range of variation in the conditions, and therefore will stifle the development of other advantageous factors until the conditions change sufficiently that it no longer is the winning factor. At this point, the whole population is ill prepared for the change, and may well perish entirely if the winning factor accidentally becomes the matching factor for a disease or a predator.

Some people are little more than herd animals, flocking together whenever the world becomes uncomfortable ... I am not one of those people. If I had a motto, it would probably be Herd thither, me hither.

I have long since given up dealing with people who hold idiotic opinions as if they had arrived at them through thinking about them.

I have actually programmed a fair bit in Perl, like I have C++ code published with my name on it. Other things I have tried and have no intention to do again if I can at all avoid it include smoking, getting drunk enough to puke and waste the whole next day with hang-over, breaking a leg in a violent car crash, getting mugged in New York City, or travel with Aeroflot.

The novice-friendly software is more like a misbehaving dog: it shits on the floor, it destroys things, and stinks - the novice-friendly software embodies the opposite of what computer people have dreamed of for decades: artificial stupidity. It's more human.

The currency in the developer community is enthusiasm.

They don't make poles long enough for me want to touch Microsoft products, and I don't want any mass-marketed game-playing device or Windows appliance near my desk or on my network. This is my workbench, dammit, it's not a pretty box to impress people with graphics and sounds. When I work at this system up to 12 hours a day, I'm profoundly uninterested in what user interface a novice user would prefer.

C++ is a language strongly optimized for liars and people who go by guesswork and ignorance.

I believe C++ instills fear in programmers, fear that the interaction of some details causes unpredictable results. Its unmanageable complexity has spawned more fear-preventing tools than any other language, but the solution should have been to create and use a language that does not overload the whole goddamn human brain with irrelevant details.

People search for the meaning of life, but this is the easy question: we are born into a world that presents us with many millenia of collected knowledge and information, and all our predecessors ask of us is that we not waste our brief life ignoring the past only to rediscover or reinvent its lessons badly.

Constructing a social system that tends to those who agree with it is a piece of cake compared to constructing one that makes those who disagree with it want to obey its principles.

The purpose of human existence is to learn and to understand as much as we can of what came before us, so we can further the sum total of human knowledge in our life.

Sometimes, the only way to learn something really well is to revert to the state of mind of a novice and reawaken to the raw observations that you have accumulated instead of relying on the conclusions you have reached from the exogenous premises absorbed through teaching and bookish learning.

I have a cat, so I know that when she digs her very sharp claws into my chest or stomach it's really a sign of affection, but I don't see any reason for programming languages to show affection with pain.

It's just that in C++ and the like, you don't trust anybody, and in CLOS you basically trust everybody. The practical result is that thieves and bums use C++ and nice people use CLOS.

Optimization is generally detrimental to future success, but it is the only way to accomplish present success in competition with others who are equally interested in short-term results.

I have come to believe that large print, thick and heavy paper, and wide margins and oversize leading is indicative of the expected intelligence of the reader ... Compare children's books and books on Web Duhsign or other X-in-21-days books. If the reading level of a specification is below college level, chances are the people behind it are morons and the result morose.

Enlightenment is probably antithetical to impatience.

I'm bothered by the fact that stupid people don't spontaneously combust, which they should.

If car manufacturers made cars according to spec the same way software vendors make software according to spec, all five wheels would be of widely differing sizes, it would take one person to steer and another to work the pedals and yet another to operate the user-friendly menu-driven dashboard, and if it would not drive straight ahead without a lot of effort, civil engineers would respond by building spiraling roads around each city.

Languages shape the way we think, or don't.

If Perl is the solution, you're solving the wrong problem.

Short of coming to their senses and abolishing the whole thing, we might expect that the rules for daylight saving time will remain the same for some time to come, but there is no guarantee. (We can only be glad there is no daylight loan time, or we would face decades of too much daylight, only to be faced with a few years of total darkness to make up for it.

The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept.

If you are concerned about netiquette, you are either concerned about your own and follow good netiquette, or you are concerned about others and violate good netiquette by bothering people with your concern, as the only netiquette you can actually affect is your own.

Life is hard, and then you die.

Would you buy a book proudly stating on the cover that its reader is a dummy? Or would you think "of course it's ironic"?

A system needs to be alive and workable even when other people than the first enthusiasts start using it. Reinvention and revolution are enthusiast stuff. Invention and evolution are engineering.

I guess there are some things that are so gross you just have to forget, or it'll destroy something within you. Perl is the first such thing I have known.

Well, take it from an old hand: the only reason it would be easier to program in C is that you can't easily express complex problems in C, so you don't.

Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary.

I have argued that a religion or a philosophy cannot speak about facts of the world - if it does, it is now or will eventually be wrong - but it can and should speak about the relevance and ranking of facts and observations.

What people "want" is a function of what they learn is available. If you wish to sell something, you'd better understand that you can't give people what they want in the market today, because what they want today is what they can already get. You have to discover what they really want, and find some way to give that physical shape.

I may be biased, but I tend to find a much lower tendency among female programmers to be dishonest about their skills, and thus do not say they know C++ when they are smart enough to realize that that would be a lie for all but perhaps 5 people on this planet.

Like many older fans of Free Software and Open Source, I have discovered that it is really only free in the sense that the time you spend on it is worthless.

A word says more than a thousand images. Exercises for the visually inclined: illustrate "appreciation", "humor", "software", "education", "inalienable rights", "elegance", "fact".