Today I learned that
Erik Naggum is dead.
Erik Naggum was one of the most (in?)famous posters in the entire USENET era. Never afraid to tell you his opinions, and always full with quotes that was either going to destroy your day or make you learn something - totally dependant upon your state of mind and ability to look into the mirror of course. A true rabulist and a really difficult person to communicate with on the USENET. A Lisp believer, always ready to tell others how inferior their programming language was. This was especially true if you were programming in Perl or C++. At one time he had so many USENET posts that Dagbladet (second largest newspaper in Norway) did an interview with him solely because of his USENET activites. I had the pleasure of being his "victim" at USENET several times.
Erik Naggum was born in 1965 and passed in 2009. Between those years there was was fury, rage, arguing, hell and 100% pure brilliance! Erik Naggum was by far one of the best (if not *THE* best) analytical minds of his time in his subject - programming...
Some characteristic famous quotes by Erik Naggum are;
- Excuse me while I barf in Larry Wall's general direction.
- A novice had a problem and could not find a solution. "I know," said the novice, "I'll just use Perl!" The novice now had two problems.
- Life is too long to be good at C/C++.
- 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.
- If you want to know why Lisp doesn't win around you, find a mirror.
- Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO is the answer.
- Intellectual laziness is punishable by brain death. It is a natural law.
- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.
- Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.
- The past is not more important than the future, despite what your culture has taught you. Your future observations, conclusions, and beliefs are more important to you than those in your past ever will be. The world is changing so fast the balance between the past and the future has shifted.
- If you think this year is "97", you are not "year 2000 compliant".
- My other car is a cdr.
As I said, the world is quite a bit darker today then it was before Naggum died. May he rest in the peace he never was able to find in this world...
.t