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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.
Erik Naggum
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Erik Naggum
Age: 44 †
Born: 1965
Born: June 13
Died: 2009
Died: June 17
Computer Programmer
It Consultant
Programmer
System
Tends
Social
Cake
Makes
Compared
Disagree
Piece
Agree
Pieces
Constructing
Principles
Obey
More quotes by Erik Naggum
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.
Erik Naggum
The Web provided me with a much needed realization that information cannot be fully separated from its presentation, and showed me something I knew without verbalizing explicitly, that the presentation form we choose communicates real information.
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.
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.
Erik Naggum
I have long since given up dealing with people who hold idiotic opinions as if they had arrived at them through thinking about them.
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.
Erik Naggum
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.
Erik Naggum
The currency in the developer community is enthusiasm.
Erik Naggum
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.
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.
Erik Naggum
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.
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.
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.
Erik Naggum
I'm bothered by the fact that stupid people don't spontaneously combust, which they should.
Erik Naggum
Enlightenment is probably antithetical to impatience.
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
Have you considered the option of getting the joke? If not, try it now and redeem your soul.
Erik Naggum
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.
Erik Naggum
Life is too long to be good at C++ – if you had spent all that time to become good at it, you would essentially have to work with it, too, to get back the costs, and that would just be some long, drawn-out torture.
Erik Naggum
That's why the smartest companies use Common Lisp, but lie about it so all their competitors think Lisp is slow and C++ is fast.
Erik Naggum
