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

More quotes by Erik Naggum

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The currency in the developer community is enthusiasm.
Erik Naggum
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If you want to know why Lisp doesn't win around you, find a mirror.
Erik Naggum
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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
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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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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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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
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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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We have no mom-and-pop oil rigs in Norway.
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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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
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The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept.
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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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
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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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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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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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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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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
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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