54 Quotes by 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.

I guess there are some things that are so gross you just have to forget, or it’ll destroy something within you. Perl is the first such thing I have known.

Languages shape the way we think, or don’t.

What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.

The very word “exist” derives from “to step forth, to stand out”.

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

Elegance is necessarily unnatural, only achieveable at great expense. If you just do something, it won’t be elegant, but if you do it and then see what might be more elegant, and do it again, you might, after an unknown number of iterations, get something that is very elegant.

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.

It’s not that Perl programmers are idiots, it’s that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.