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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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Erik Naggum
Age: 44 †
Born: 1965
Born: June 13
Died: 2009
Died: June 17
Computer Programmer
It Consultant
Programmer
Differently
Foolish
Express
Contrary
Notion
Different
Optimize
Way
Immaterial
People
Syntax

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.
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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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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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A word says more than a thousand images. Exercises for the visually inclined: illustrate appreciation, humor, software, education, inalienable rights, elegance, fact.
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If you want to know why Lisp doesn't win around you, find a mirror.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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Once we were Programmers. Maybe our last best hope is a movie.
Erik Naggum
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We have no mom-and-pop oil rigs in Norway.
Erik Naggum
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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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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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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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Enlightenment is probably antithetical to impatience.
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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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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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