Erik Naggum quotes

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. (Erik Naggum)
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
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"? View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
Part of any serious QA is removing Perl code the same way you go over a dilapidated building you inherit to remove chewing gum and duct tape and fix whatever was kept together for real. View quote
Erik Naggum
Life is hard, and then you die. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
C is not clean – the language has many gotchas and traps, and although its semantics are simple in some sense, it is not any cleaner than the assembly-language design it is based on. View quote
Erik Naggum
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I regret that this isn't fatal. View quote
Erik Naggum
'Code sharing' is an economic surplus phenomenon. It works only when none of the people involved in it are in any form of need. (Erik Naggum)
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
The only important property of evils of the past is that they not be repeated in the future, in any way, shape, or form. View quote
Erik Naggum
Enlightenment is probably antithetical to impatience. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
XML is a giant step in no direction at all. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
Let's just hope that all the world is run by Bill Gates before the Perl hackers can destroy it. View quote
Erik Naggum
What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix. View quote
Erik Naggum
Contrary to the foolish notion that syntax is immaterial, people optimize the way they express themselves, and so express themselves differently with different syntaxes. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. (Erik Naggum)
Once we were Programmers. Maybe our last best hope is a movie. View quote
Erik Naggum
Have you considered the option of getting the joke? If not, try it now and redeem your soul. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
C being what it is lacks support for multiple return values, so the notion that it is meaningful to pass pointers to memory objects into which any random function may write random values without having a clue where they point, has not been debunked as the sheer idiocy it really is. View quote
Erik Naggum