Erik Naggum Quotes

I believe that structure is a product, not a process.

I'm bothered by the fact that stupid people don't spontaneously combust, which they should.

If the syntax is good enough for the information, it should be good enough for the meta-information.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I regret that this isn't fatal.

In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.

It's not that Perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.

For some reason, the United States is the only country on Earth where accidents don't happen – it's always somebody's fault, and you can sue that somebody for neglect.

The secret to feeling great about yourself is not to be found in searching for people who are less than you and then show yourself superior to them, but in searching for people who are more than you and then show yourself worthy of their company.

If GML was an infant, SGML is the bright youngster who far exceeds expectations and made its parents too proud, but XML is the drug-addicted gang member who had committed his first murder before he had sex, which was rape.

Whoever decided to use the semicolon to end something should just be taken out and have his colon semified. (At least COBOL and SQL managed to use a period.)

Note that ANSI standards also cost way too much compared to toilet paper, and they're pretty bad quality as toilet paper goes, too.

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.

I may be biased, but I tend to find a much lower tendency among female programmers to be dishonest about their skills, and thus do not say they know C++ when they are smart enough to realize that that would be a lie for all but perhaps 5 people on this planet.

A system needs to be alive and workable even when other people than the first enthusiasts start using it. Reinvention and revolution are enthusiast stuff. Invention and evolution are engineering.

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.