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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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Erik Naggum
Age: 44 †
Born: 1965
Born: June 13
Died: 2009
Died: June 17
Computer Programmer
It Consultant
Programmer
Admire
Horrible
Called
Unix
Successful
Perl
Ability
Collectively
Actually
Abstraction
Mess
Provide

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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.
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I'm bothered by the fact that stupid people don't spontaneously combust, which they should.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept.
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Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO is the answer.
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We have no mom-and-pop oil rigs in Norway.
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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.
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Once we were Programmers. Maybe our last best hope is a movie.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If you want to know why Lisp doesn't win around you, find a mirror.
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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.
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