Erik Naggum (1965 – 2009)
Lisp programmer.
Environmentalists are much too concerned with planet Earth. Their geocentric attitude prevents them from seeing the greater picture – lots of planets are much worse off than Earth is.
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.
The ultimate laziness is not using Perl. That saves you so much work you wouldn't believe it if you had never tried it.
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.
If, however, one factor is too successful, it will continue to be the winning factor regardless of the variation in the other factors over the range of variation in the conditions, and therefore will stifle the development of other advantageous factors until the conditions change sufficiently that it no longer is the winning factor. At this point, the whole population is ill prepared for the change, and may well perish entirely if the winning factor accidentally becomes the matching factor for a disease or a predator.
Enlightenment is probably antithetical to impatience.
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.)
Intellectual laziness is punishable by brain death. It is a natural law.
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.
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!
Just as other information should be available to those who want to learn and understand, program source code is the only means for programmers to learn the art from their predecessors. It would be unthinkable for playwrights not to allow other playwrights to read their plays, but only be present at theater performances where they would be barred even from taking notes. Likewise, any good author is well read, as every child who learns to write will read hundreds of times more than it writes. Programmers, however, are expected to invent the alphabet and learn to write long novels all on their own. Programming cannot grow and learn unless the next generation of programmers have access to the knowledge and information gathered by other programmers before them.
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.
If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.
1,3,7-trimethylxanthine – a basic ingredient in quality software.
Whoever decided to use the semicolon to end something should just be taken out and have his colon semified. (At least COBOL and SQL managed to use a period.)
Languages shape the way we think, or don't.
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.
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.
The Internet will not become a money machine until the banking industry figures out how to transfer money for free so you can charge USD 0.005 (half a cent) for some simple service like, say, reading a newspaper article you have searched for. With today's payment system, the cost of the transfer of the funds completely dwarf the cost of the service paid for. … This situation, however, is what acutely prevents the Internet from taking off as a network for paid services.
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.