Quote

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
Social
Cake
Makes
Compared
Disagree
Piece
Agree
Pieces
Constructing
Principles
Obey
System
Tends

More quotes by Erik Naggum

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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
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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
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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
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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
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The ultimate laziness is not using Perl. That saves you so much work you wouldn't believe it if you had never tried it.
Erik Naggum
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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
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I'm bothered by the fact that stupid people don't spontaneously combust, which they should.
Erik Naggum
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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.
Erik Naggum
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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
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We have no mom-and-pop oil rigs in Norway.
Erik Naggum
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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
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'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
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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.
Erik Naggum
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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
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Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO is the answer.
Erik Naggum
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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
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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.
Erik Naggum
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Very clever implementation techniques are required to implement this insanity correctly and usefully, not to mention that code written with this feature used and abused east and west is exceptionally exciting to debug.
Erik Naggum
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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
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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.
Erik Naggum