Erik Naggum quotes - page 3

I'm bothered by the fact that stupid people don't spontaneously combust, which they should. (Erik Naggum)
Elegance is necessarily unnatural, only achieveable at great expense. If you just do something, it won't be elegant, but if you do it and then see what might be more elegant, and do it again, you might, after an unknown number of iterations, get something that is very elegant. View quote
Erik Naggum
Gotos aren't damnable to begin with. If you aren't smart enough to distinguish what's bad about some gotos from all gotos, goto hell. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
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.) View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
The very word "exist" derives from "to step forth, to stand out." View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
The fundamental deficiency in HTML is that it reduces hypertext and the intertwinedness of human communication to a question of how it is rendered and what happens when you click on it. ... HTML is to the browser what PostScript is to the laser printer. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. (Erik Naggum)
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
If Perl is the solution, you're solving the wrong problem. View quote
Erik Naggum
The Internet will not become a money machine until the banking industry figures out how to transfer money for free so you can charge USD 0.005 (half a cent) for some simple service like, say, reading a newspaper article you have searched for. With today's payment system, the cost of the transfer of the funds completely dwarf the cost of the service paid for. ... This situation, however, is what acutely prevents the Internet from taking off as a network for paid services. View quote
Erik Naggum
If you want to know why Lisp doesn't win around you, find a mirror. View quote
Erik Naggum
[translated from Norwegian with google] Some people are not much more than herd animals, which rot together when the world becomes uncomfortable... I am not one of them. If I had a motto, it would probably be: The herd over there, I here. View quote
Erik Naggum
Getting C programmers to understand that they cause the computer to do less than minimum is intractable. ... Ask him why he thinks he should be able to get away with unsafe code, core dumps, viruses, buffer overruns, undetected errors, etc., just because he wants "speed". View quote
Erik Naggum
... 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. View quote
Erik Naggum
Historically, labor unions arose when people had gotten a taste of a different lifestyle and were willing to pay a lot more for their basic livelihood and had gotten into a fix they couldn't get out of – because they had accepted the unacceptable to begin with. Accepting something you have to form a labor union to fight after the fact only tells me that people were acting against their own best (or even good) interests for a long time. I don't see any rational, coherent explanation for this sort of behavior in humans, but it's all over the place. View quote
Erik Naggum
The past is not more important than the future, despite what your culture has taught you. Your future observations, conclusions, and beliefs are more important to you than those in your past ever will be. The world is changing so fast the balance between the past and the future has shifted. (Erik Naggum)
If GML was an infant, SGML is the bright youngster who far exceeds expectations and made its parents too proud, but XML is the drug-addicted gang member who had committed his first murder before he had sex, which was rape. View quote
Erik Naggum
The theory is the result of listening to the problem. When the theory acquires a life of its own because some people like it more than the real world, all kinds of uninspiring, uninteresting things happen, so the key is both to listen to the problem and to study the theory. But always remember that just as much theory is bunk as there are buggy solutions. There is nothing more wrong with "theory" than "solutions" – both their quality and their applicability are orthogonal to their existence. View quote
Erik Naggum
Intellectual laziness is punishable by brain death. It is a natural law. View quote
Erik Naggum
If the syntax is good enough for the information, it should be good enough for the meta-information. View quote
Erik Naggum