Erik Naggum: Quotes about people

“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.”

Erik Naggum

Re: CLL statistics for 2002 (was: Looking for Lisp compiler) http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3250612397276876@naggum.no.html (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People , Secret , Feeling , Search

“Look at Unix. It was essentially open source before anyone invented the term, and that caused a large number of ways to solve the same problem and left the market to sort them out, which they didn't (the market never will sort out bad quality in anything but the single most important property of the products), and Unix got itself into a position where some horribly demented crapware from Microsoft could compete with it and fool a whole bunch of people for a while.”

Erik Naggum

Re: source access vs dynamism http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/e10a8b07a244d7fa (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People , Fools , Way , Problem

“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

Usenet signatures

People

“People search for the meaning of life, but this is the easy question: we are born into a world that presents us with many millennia 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

" Knowledge and Information http://naggum.no/erik/knowledge.html".

Life , People , World , Search

“C++ is a language strongly optimized for liars and people who go by guesswork and ignorance.”

Erik Naggum

Re: is CLOS reall OO? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/917737b7cc8510e3 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, C++

People , Optimism

“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

On nynorsk, from Re: Irish road-signs are now metric http://groups.google.com/group/misc.metric-system/msg/aaa11856a516419a (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People , History , Communication

“Contrary to the foolish notion that syntax is immaterial, people optimize the way they express themselves, and so express themselves differently with different syntaxes.”

Erik Naggum

Re: S-exp vs XML, HTML, LaTeX (was: Why lisp is growing) http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/9a30c508201627ee (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People , Way , Optimism

“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

Re: creation of lisp machine/lispOS http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/c2fd86a7e43ac7aa (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People , Way , Understanding , Learning

“The theory is the result of listening to the problem. When the theory acquires a life of its own because some people like it more than the real world, all kinds of uninspiring, uninteresting things happen, so the key is both to listen to the problem and to study the theory. But always remember that just as much theory is bunk as there are buggy solutions. There is nothing more wrong with "theory" than "solutions" – both their quality and their applicability are orthogonal to their existence.”

Erik Naggum

Re: "Choose the Right Language" in "Tutorial" by Norvig and Pitman http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/99d41ab4a42978b1 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Life , People , World , Problem

“I'm bothered by the fact that stupid people don't spontaneously combust, which they should.”

Erik Naggum

Re: A draft business plan for free software LISP vendors http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/3bb9094cbc310a0f (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People , Stupidity

“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

“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

Re: Is LISP dying? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.misc/msg/63257b85465935eb
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People , Books

“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

“Structure is nothing if it is all you got. Skeletons spook people if they try to walk around on their own. I really wonder why XML does not.”

Erik Naggum

Re: The horror that is XML http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/7d410e0ae791d1cb (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People

“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

Re: "Well, I want to switch over to replace EMACS LISP with Guile." http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/6b361a9c756dc9a1 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Children , People , Books , Intelligence

“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

Re: source access vs dynamism http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/9f52849f233672f4 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People , Behavior , Time , Fight

“Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary.”

Erik Naggum

Re: Ousterhout and Tcl lost the plot with latest paper http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.functional/msg/3576250859e4d4aa (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People , Cooking

“A "new" language that differs from the rest of the crop by one or a couple features is proof positive that both what it came from and what it has become are mutations about to die. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of such "languages" that people have invented over the years, for all sorts of weird purposes where they just could not use whatever language they were already using, could not extend it, and could not fathom how to modify its tools without making a whole new language. They never stopped to think about how horribly wasteful this is, they just went on to create yet another language called Dodo, the Titanic, Edsel, Kyoto-agreement …”

Erik Naggum

Re: Representing code as XML: the Flare Programming Language http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/ecea40eb1602ce7c (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People , Thinking

“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