Erik Naggum quotes - page 2

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)
We have no mom-and-pop oil rigs in Norway. View quote
Erik Naggum
Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary. View quote
Erik Naggum
Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from sarcasm. View quote
Erik Naggum
Like many older fans of Free Software and Open Source, I have discovered that it is really only free in the sense that the time you spend on it is worthless. View quote
Erik Naggum
Suppose we blasted all politicians into space. Would the SETI project find even one of them? View quote
Erik Naggum
Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO is the answer. View quote
Erik Naggum
In C++, reinvention is its own reward. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
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)
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
A word says more than a thousand images. Exercises for the visually inclined: illustrate "appreciation", "humor", "software", "education", "inalienable rights", "elegance", "fact". View quote
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
C++ is a language strongly optimized for liars and people who go by guesswork and ignorance. View quote
Erik Naggum
Languages shape the way we think, or don't. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
The currency in the developer community is enthusiasm. (Erik Naggum)
A system needs to be alive and workable even when other people than the first enthusiasts start using it. Reinvention and revolution are enthusiast stuff. Invention and evolution are engineering. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
Erik Naggum
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. View quote
Erik Naggum