Erik Naggum Quotes

If you are concerned about netiquette, you are either concerned about your own and follow good netiquette, or you are concerned about others and violate good netiquette by bothering people with your "concern", as the only netiquette you can actually affect is your own.

Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary.

If car manufacturers made cars according to spec the same way software vendors make software according to spec, all five wheels would be of widely differing sizes, it would take one person to steer and another to work the pedals and yet another to operate the user-friendly menu-driven dashboard, and if it would not drive straight ahead without a lot of effort, civil engineers would respond by building spiraling roads around each city.

My other car is a cdr.

Kranglefant på nettet (Publisert lørdag 9. januar 1999 - 09:18)

Some people are little more than herd animals, flocking together whenever the world becomes uncomfortable for any reason, seeking the comfort of those who agree with them, do not contradict them, and take care of their emotions. I am not one of those people. If I had a motto, it would probably be Herd thither, me hither.

The past is not more important than the future, despite what your culture has taught you. Your future observations, conclusions, and beliefs are more important to you than those in your past ever will be. The world is changing so fast the balance between the past and the future has shifted.

Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO is the answer.

I believe C++ instills fear in programmers, fear that the interaction of some details causes unpredictable results. Its unmanageable complexity has spawned more fear-preventing tools than any other language, but the solution should have been to create and use a language that does not overload the whole goddamn human brain with irrelevant details.

Historically, labor unions arose when people had gotten a taste of a different lifestyle and were willing to pay a lot more for their basic livelihood and had gotten into a fix they couldn't get out of – because they had accepted the unacceptable to begin with. Accepting something you have to form a labor union to fight after the fact only tells me that people were acting against their own best (or even good) interests for a long time. I don't see any rational, coherent explanation for this sort of behavior in humans, but it's all over the place.

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.

Contrary to the foolish notion that syntax is immaterial, people optimize the way they express themselves, and so express themselves differently with different syntaxes.

I went to my local bookstore the other day. I wanted to give a beautifully bound Bible to a Christian friend of mine. Suddenly, I felt space around me warp and I was in USENET space. People from comp.lang.scheme offered me a beutifully bound Torah. People from comp.lang.dylan offered me a beautifully bound Koran. People from elsewhere on the Net offered me beautifully bound copies of The Lord of the Rings, Atlas Shrugged, A New Kind of Science, and then other people chimed in with suggestions for Gray's Anatomy, The Chicago Manual of Style, and the 25-year anniversary edition of Gödel, Escher, Bach, all of them arguing that if I wanted the most important book, I would want their suggestions. I scremed, "Enough!", and space just as suddenly warped back to the bookstore and the very helpful young Muslim woman behind the counter went to find a soft-leather-bound Bible with gold edges on the India paper, just like I had wanted and asked for, without unwelcome suggestions or anyone pretending to know better than me. It was so respectful I almost got religion, myself.

A word says more than a thousand images. Exercises for the visually inclined: illustrate "appreciation", "humor", "software", "education", "inalienable rights", "elegance", "fact".

If Perl is the solution, you're solving the wrong problem.