Erik Naggum Quotes

Rewarding incompetence and ignorance increases the number of incompetent programmers. Designing programming languages and tools so incompetent programmers can feel better about themselves is not the way to go.

Is it still "artificial intelligence" when the task is to model human stupidity, or would only preventing its devastating consequences get an "AI" rating?

The novice-friendly software is more like a misbehaving dog: it shits on the floor, it destroys things, and stinks – the novice-friendly software embodies the opposite of what computer people have dreamed of for decades: artificial stupidity. It's more human.

The Novice has been the focus of an alarming amount of attention in the computer field. It is not just that the preferred user is unskilled, it is that the whole field in its application rewards novices and punishes experts. What you learn today will be useless a few years hence, so why bother to study and know anything well? I think this is the main reason for the IT winter we are now experiencing.

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.

A "new" language that differs from the rest of the crop by one or a couple features is proof positive that both what it came from and what it has become are mutations about to die. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of such "languages" that people have invented over the years, for all sorts of weird purposes where they just could not use whatever language they were already using, could not extend it, and could not fathom how to modify its tools without making a whole new language. They never stopped to think about how horribly wasteful this is, they just went on to create yet another language called Dodo, the Titanic, Edsel, Kyoto-agreement …

They are not identical. The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept. Robbery is not just another way of making a living, rape is not just another way of satisfying basic human needs, torture is not just another way of interrogation. And XML is not just another way of writing S-exps. There are some things in life that you do not do if you want to be a moral being and feel proud of what you have accomplished.

Structure is nothing if it is all you got. Skeletons spook people if they try to walk around on their own. I really wonder why XML does not.

XML is a giant step in no direction at all.

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.

The fundamental deficiency in HTML is that it reduces hypertext and the intertwinedness of human communication to a question of how it is rendered and what happens when you click on it. … HTML is to the browser what PostScript is to the laser printer.

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.

Sometimes, the only way to learn something really well is to revert to the state of mind of a novice and reawaken to the raw observations that you have accumulated instead of relying on the conclusions you have reached from the exogenous premises absorbed through teaching and bookish learning.

Computer programming is like the ability or skill to see what Picasso saw from all the different angles at once. If it is an art, the crucial element of art is to look at things from an angle that produces new insight or at least has that potential.

More and more, people see that solving any problem is a question of acquiring knowledge and having respect for the cognitive and epistemological processes involved in the human brain: use what you know, learn what you can, and if you have to guess, be aware that you do so you can go back and update your guesses when you (hopefully) learn more.