Erik Naggum Quotes
1965–2009 Norway
Erik Naggum (June 13, 1965 – June 17, 2009) was a Lisp programmer.
Also known as: Naggum
Random Erik Naggum quote
84 quotes
God grant me serenity to accept the code I cannot change, courage to change the code I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
1,3,7-trimethylxanthine – a basic ingredient in quality software.
Excuse me while I barf in Larry Wall's general direction.
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.
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.)
Constructing a social system that tends to those who agree with it is a piece of cake compared to constructing one that makes those who disagree with it want to obey its principles.
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.
Part of any serious QA is removing Perl code the same way you go over a dilapidated building you inherit to remove chewing gum and duct tape and fix whatever was kept together for real.
Elegance is necessarily unnatural, only achieveable at great expense. If you just do something, it won't be elegant, but if you do it and then see what might be more elegant, and do it again, you might, after an unknown number of iterations, get something that is very elegant.
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.
A word says more than a thousand images. Exercises for the visually inclined: illustrate "appreciation", "humor", "software", "education", "inalienable rights", "elegance", "fact".
Intellectual laziness is punishable by brain death. It is a natural law.
Suppose we blasted all politicians into space. Would the SETI project find even one of them?
Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.
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.
Environmentalists are much too concerned with planet Earth. Their geocentric attitude prevents them from seeing the greater picture – lots of planets are much worse off than Earth is.
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.
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.
This is your brain. This is Perl. This is your brain on Perl. Any questions?
Shed the idea that you were programming in an OO style. There is no such thing. You were only programming a particular object system. Now you get to program a different object system.