Erik Naggum: Trending quotes (page 3)

“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

The Long, Painful History of Time http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html.

Sense , Time

“What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.”

Erik Naggum

Re: Using Lisp to Call another program in linux? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/7c588cdb91a10d4d (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Perl

Success

“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.”

Erik Naggum

Re: can lisp do what perl does easily? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/fc76ebab1cb2f863 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Perl

Way , Behavior

“Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.”

Erik Naggum

Usenet signatures

Faith , Failure , Study

“Just as other information should be available to those who want to learn and understand, program source code is the only means for programmers to learn the art from their predecessors. It would be unthinkable for playwrights not to allow other playwrights to read their plays, but only be present at theater performances where they would be barred even from taking notes. Likewise, any good author is well read, as every child who learns to write will read hundreds of times more than it writes. Programmers, however, are expected to invent the alphabet and learn to write long novels all on their own. Programming cannot grow and learn unless the next generation of programmers have access to the knowledge and information gathered by other programmers before them.”

Erik Naggum

" Programming http://naggum.no/erik/programming.html", cited in the preface of Physically Based Rendering (2004) by Matt Pharr and Greg Humphreys.

Art , Understanding , Knowledge , Learning

“Suppose we blasted all politicians into space. Would the SETI project find even one of them?”

Erik Naggum

Usenet signatures

“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.”

Erik Naggum

Re: PART TWO: winning industrial-use of lisp: Re: Norvig's latest paper on Lisp http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/6cce7cd281ff6126 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Business , Time , Fight

“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.”

Erik Naggum

Re: How much use of CLOS? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/60f4c36a707db3fe (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Idea

“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

Re: O'reilly subjugated to the Lisp juggenaut http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/a10d0e7d8e7354b2 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Disease , Change , Success

“The very word "exist" derives from "to step forth, to stand out."”

Erik Naggum

Re: Lisp advocacy misadventures http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/a05e5e2737bddd69 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

“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

Re: Philosophy of Lisp programmers http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/70c2703e68baae46 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

World , Religion

“aestheticles: n. The little-known source of aesthetic reactions. If your whole body feels like going into a fetal position or otherwise double over from the pain of experiencing something exceptionally ugly and inelegant, such as C++, it's because your aestheticles got creamed.”

Erik Naggum

Re: Learning curve for common lisp http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/4356934aa0d7c2fe (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, C++

Pain , Feeling

“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

Re: In praise of Java. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/f0f59b2b18124881 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, C++

People , Lie

“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

Re: Polymorphism in Common Lisp http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/28cb9d4217fe6dc3 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

“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!”

Erik Naggum

Re: RFC: Lisp/Scheme with less parentheses through Python-like significant indentation? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/308ecb00b29198ba (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Communication

“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

Re: Upper limits of CL http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b3b24fb7512f220f (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Thinking

“… so as long as you do The Right Thing and forget how you would do it in C, you should be able to get a good grip on this.”

Erik Naggum

Re: Allegro CL foreign function interface http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/2ec281a4f469bb35 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles

Forgetting

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I regret that this isn't fatal.”

Erik Naggum

Re: unibyte http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.emacs.help/msg/d767a45084444a5a (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous