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 More Quotes by Erik Naggum More Quotes From Erik Naggum 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 believe book children 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 darkness guarantees years C is not clean – the language has many gotchas and traps, and although its semantics are simple in some sense, it is not any cleaner than the assembly-language design it is based on. Erik Naggum design language simple 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 should-have brain believe 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 effort car cities A word says more than a thousand images. Exercises for the visually inclined: illustrate "appreciation", "humor", "software", "education", "inalienable rights", "elegance", "fact". Erik Naggum rights exercise appreciation The ultimate laziness is not using Perl. That saves you so much work you wouldn't believe it if you had never tried it. Erik Naggum ultimate laziness believe If Perl is the solution, you're solving the wrong problem. Erik Naggum solutions problem ifs 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. Erik Naggum software source fans Suppose we blasted all politicians into space. Would the SETI project find even one of them? Erik Naggum projects politician space Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO is the answer. Erik Naggum microsoft technology answers Languages shape the way we think, or don't. Erik Naggum shapes way thinking The purpose of human existence is to learn and to understand as much as we can of what came before us, so we can further the sum total of human knowledge in our life. Erik Naggum existence humans purpose 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 cost life-is long 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 writing meaningful memories Well, take it from an old hand: the only reason it would be easier to program in C is that you can't easily express complex problems in C, so you don't. Erik Naggum problem would-be hands Constructing a social system that tends to those who agree with it is a piece of cake compared to constructing one that makes those who disagree with it want to obey its principles. Erik Naggum cake pieces principles Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from sarcasm. Erik Naggum political-correctness sarcasm political I have a cat, so I know that when she digs her very sharp claws into my chest or stomach it's really a sign of affection, but I don't see any reason for programming languages to show affection with pain. Erik Naggum affection cat pain Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary. Erik Naggum delight novelty people
