Erik Naggum Quotes

107 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

Erik Naggum
Common Lisp is a big-city language. Spit out the hayseed, pronounce "shit" with one syllable and "shotgun" with two. You're not in Kansas, anymore. C is the language of the poor farmer village where the allocation of every seed and livestock matters, where taxes are low and public service non-existent. Appreciating the value of a large language is evidently hard for many people, just like many people find themselves miserable in the big city and go to great lengths to create a small village for themselves in the city where everything is like it used to be where they came from.

Erik Naggum
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.

Erik Naggum
Let's just hope that all the world is run by Bill Gates before the Perl hackers can destroy it.

Erik Naggum
This is your brain. This is Perl. This is your brain on Perl. Any questions?

Erik Naggum
"Code sharing" is an economic surplus phenomenon. It works only when none of the people involved in it are in any form of need.

Erik Naggum
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.

Erik Naggum
Would you buy a book proudly stating on the cover that its reader is a dummy? Or would you think "of course it's ironic"?

Erik Naggum
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.

Erik Naggum
Companies that go bankrupt are a danger to healthy competition. They are able to make their creditors and shareholders pay for their losses and bad management and then to start anew with assets that they essentially got for free, quite unlike the competition that has not gone bankrupt, who have to pay full price for their assets, but quite similar to how their customers have wanted their products, for too little money.

Erik Naggum
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.

Erik Naggum
Getting C programmers to understand that they cause the computer to do less than minimum is intractable. … Ask him why he thinks he should be able to get away with unsafe code, core dumps, viruses, buffer overruns, undetected errors, etc., just because he wants "speed".

Erik Naggum
If I sound grumpy, it is only because I have come across too many idiots of the "it can't be done" persuasion lately, the kind of managers who have an aquarium in their office because fifteen brains think better than one.

Erik Naggum
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.)

Erik Naggum
The ultimate laziness is not using Perl. That saves you so much work you wouldn't believe it if you had never tried it.

Erik Naggum
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.

Erik Naggum