Erik Naggum Quotes

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.

The only important property of evils of the past is that they not be repeated in the future, in any way, shape, or form.

We have no mom-and-pop oil rigs in Norway.

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.

In Norway, we have a community of people who prefer to use a version of Norwegian that looks very much like lutefisk: Dug up remains from the garbage heap of history and dressed up to look like a tradition.

From the Latin word "imponere", base of the obsolete English "impone" and translated as "impress" in modern English, Nordic hackers have coined the terms "imponator" (a device that does nothing but impress bystanders, referred to as the "imponator effect") and "imponade" (that "goo" that fills you as you get impressed with something – from "marmelade", often referred as "full of imponade", always ironic).

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.

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

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.

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.

Suppose you want to convert a bunch of pictures into icons. Suppose you know how to do that with one picture: you click on the file, "drag" it over to the icon-generating program, then "drop" it there. Repeat until thoroughly disgusted with the idiocy of the paradigm of direct manipulation. Suppose instead you were able to communicate your actual desire to the computer, in (gasp!) a language!

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.

I have argued that a religion or a philosophy cannot speak about facts of the world – if it does, it is now or will eventually be wrong – but it can and should speak about the relevance and ranking of facts and observations.

When all actions are used for feedback, the consequence of making mistakes will be a corrective and appropriate response, because everything everybody does matters. … The more selective you are in the feedback you accept, the more insane your reasoning will become as you will necessarily reject corrective feedback that would have led to better reasoning.

If, however, one factor is too successful, it will continue to be the winning factor regardless of the variation in the other factors over the range of variation in the conditions, and therefore will stifle the development of other advantageous factors until the conditions change sufficiently that it no longer is the winning factor. At this point, the whole population is ill prepared for the change, and may well perish entirely if the winning factor accidentally becomes the matching factor for a disease or a predator.