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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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Erik Naggum
Age: 44 †
Born: 1965
Born: June 13
Died: 2009
Died: June 17
Computer Programmer
It Consultant
Programmer
Work
Means
Usually
Something
Away
Poetry
Reams
Really
Art
Taking
Stephen
Like
Ideas
Novel
Expresses
Wells
Quality
Code
Well
High
King
Mean
Getting
Fast
Writing
Making
Kings

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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'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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If you want to know why Lisp doesn't win around you, find a mirror.
Erik Naggum
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The currency in the developer community is enthusiasm.
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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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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Have you considered the option of getting the joke? If not, try it now and redeem your soul.
Erik Naggum
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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.
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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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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Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO is the answer.
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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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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A word says more than a thousand images. Exercises for the visually inclined: illustrate appreciation, humor, software, education, inalienable rights, elegance, fact.
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