Erik Naggum: Doing

“Please note: if you think the above is offensive, it is of course a joke and you did not get it. If you do not find it offensive, it is of course not a joke, and you did not get it. This is not a joke. Get it?”

Erik Naggum

Re: Preventing a class from being instantiated http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3216091792432486@naggum.net.html (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Thinking

“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

Re: Filk, puns, and other time wasting. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/4bda6a98e5cf0bce (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

“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

“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

“… 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

“The clumsiness of people who have to engage their brain at every step is unbearably painful to watch, at least to me, and that's what the novice-friendly software makes people do, because there's no elegance in them, it's just a mass of features to be learned by rote. However, this suits people a hell of a lot better than setting out at age 6 to become a great ballet dancer and achieving their goal 20 years later after every tendon and muscle and joint has been asked to perform just a little bit more than nature ever intended over and over and over again. To most people, this is insanity. But in reality, it's art, and it's the art in what we do that makes us human.”

Erik Naggum

read the fine manual, please http://groups.google.com/group/comp.emacs/msg/821a0f04bab91864 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Pain , People , Age , Art

“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

Re: Lisp advocacy misadventures http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/52564cc186195b05 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles

Error , Understanding , Thinking , Speed

“Unfortunately, nigh the whole world is now duped into thinking that silly fill-in forms on web pages is the way to do user interfaces.”

Erik Naggum

Re: Pause for keystroke http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/4539e251e76e966a.
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

World , Way , Thinking

“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.”

Erik Naggum

Re: S-exp vs XML, HTML, LaTeX (was: Why lisp is growing) http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/s-exp_vs_XML (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Life , Way , Feeling

“So pardon my cynical twist, but what are you doing with that 20,000×20,000 double-precision floating point matrix you say you need to invert today? If you answer "nutt'n, I jus kinda wondered what it'd be like, you know", you should be very happy that I am most likely more than 3000 miles away from you, or I would come over and slap you hard.”

Erik Naggum

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

Happiness

“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.”

Erik Naggum

Re: is CLOS reall OO? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/917737b7cc8510e3?dmode=source&output=gplain (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People , Question , Knowledge , Problem

“Some people are little more than herd animals, flocking together whenever the world becomes uncomfortable for any reason, seeking the comfort of those who agree with them, do not contradict them, and take care of their emotions. I am not one of those people. If I had a motto, it would probably be Herd thither, me hither.”

Erik Naggum

Ungregarious News http://ungregarious.org/2004/

People , World , Animals

“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

Re: How is perl braindamaged? (was Re: Is LISP dying?) http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/37b0ddc2524a8214 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Perl

Cars , Travel