Quotes by Erik Naggum - Page 2 | QuoteForever

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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 / Computer Programmer
Community
Looks
People
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Life is too long to be good at C++ – if you had spent all that time to become good at it, you would essentially have to work with it, too, to get back the costs, and that would just be some long, drawn-out torture.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Cost
Life Is
Long
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Very clever implementation techniques are required to implement this insanity correctly and usefully, not to mention that code written with this feature used and abused east and west is exceptionally exciting to debug.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Clever
Insanity
Used And Abused
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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.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Doe
Philosophy
World
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Just getting something to work usually means writing reams of code fast, like a Stephen King novel, but making it maintainable and high-quality code that really expresses the ideas well, is like writing poetry. Art is taking away.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Art
Kings
Quality
Writing
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Ignoring for a moment the power of the American Medical Association, we still wouldn't see a huge amount of books on neurosurgery for dummies in 21 days or whatever. It's just plain inappropriate, and it's intentionally out of people's reach.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Association
Book
People
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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 / Computer Programmer
Communicate
Information
Real
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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.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Communication
Fundamentals
Html
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All experience has taught us that solving a complex problem uncovers hidden assumptions and ever more knowledge, trade-offs that we didn't anticipate but which can make the difference between meeting a deadline and going into research mode for a year, etc.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Differences
Taught Us
Years
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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.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Dog
Opposites
People
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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.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Lying
Skills
Smart
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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 / Computer Programmer
Bother
Concern
People
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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 / Computer Programmer
Errors
Etc
Thinking
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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.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Elegance
Might
Numbers
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C being what it is lacks support for multiple return values, so the notion that it is meaningful to pass pointers to memory objects into which any random function may write random values without having a clue where they point, has not been debunked as the sheer idiocy it really is.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Meaningful
Memories
Writing
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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.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Mind
Novices
Teaching
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People search for the meaning of life, but this is the easy question: we are born into a world that presents us with many millenia of collected knowledge and information, and all our predecessors ask of us is that we not waste our brief life ignoring the past only to rediscover or reinvent its lessons badly.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Meaning Of Life
Past
People
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What people "want" is a function of what they learn is available. If you wish to sell something, you'd better understand that you can't give people what they want in the market today, because what they want today is what they can already get. You have to discover what they really want, and find some way to give that physical shape.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Giving
People
Wish
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I believe C++ instills fear in programmers, fear that the interaction of some details causes unpredictable results. Its unmanageable complexity has spawned more fear-preventing tools than any other language, but the solution should have been to create and use a language that does not overload the whole goddamn human brain with irrelevant details.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Believe
Brain
Should Have
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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.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Doe
Insane
Mistake
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You become a serious programmer by going through a stage where you are fully aware of the degree to which you know the specification, meaning both the explicit and the tacit specification of your language and of your problem. "Hey, it works most of the time" is the very antithesis of a serious programmer, and certain languages can only support code like that.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Degrees
Hey
Support
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Short of coming to their senses and abolishing the whole thing, we might expect that the rules for daylight saving time will remain the same for some time to come, but there is no guarantee. (We can only be glad there is no daylight loan time, or we would face decades of too much daylight, only to be faced with a few years of total darkness to make up for it.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Darkness
Guarantees
Years
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I have actually programmed a fair bit in Perl, like I have C++ code published with my name on it. Other things I have tried and have no intention to do again if I can at all avoid it include smoking, getting drunk enough to puke and waste the whole next day with hang-over, breaking a leg in a violent car crash, getting mugged in New York City, or travel with Aeroflot.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
New York
Cities
Names
Next Day
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I have come to believe that large print, thick and heavy paper, and wide margins and oversize leading is indicative of the expected intelligence of the reader. … Compare children's books and books on Web Duhsign or other X-in-21-days books. If the reading level of a specification is below college level, chances are the people behind it are morons and the result morose.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Believe
Book
Children
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They don't make poles long enough for me want to touch Microsoft products, and I don't want any mass-marketed game-playing device or Windows appliance near my desk or on my network. This is my workbench, dammit, it's not a pretty box to impress people with graphics and sounds. When I work at this system up to 12 hours a day, I'm profoundly uninterested in what user interface a novice user would prefer.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Games
Long
People
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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).
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Bystanders
Ironic
Latin
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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.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Car
Cities
Effort
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The Internet will not become a money machine until the banking industry figures out how to transfer money for free so you can charge USD 0.005 (half a cent) for some simple service like, say, reading a newspaper article you have searched for. With today's payment system, the cost of the transfer of the funds completely dwarf the cost of the service paid for. ... This situation, however, is what acutely prevents the Internet from taking off as a network for paid services.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Dwarves
Reading
Simple
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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.
Erik Naggum / Computer Programmer
Population
Successful
Winning
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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 / Computer Programmer
Fighting
Long
People
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