The Wisdom of Erik Naggum | Hacker News Reader

The Wisdom of Erik Naggum

loper-os.org

40 pointsfogus13 comments

Some more of Erik Naggum's "wisdom." He was brilliant, but he could also be astonishingly cruel.

I'm overjoyed that I actually hurt your feelings. I wish I could hurt your feelings so much you would commit suicide. sadly, this has failed, and now the world has to live with an amoral creep who considers himself above ethics and reproach. you are clearly a psychotic monster, beset with hatred and malice towards everything that hurts you, and you're so out of touch with reality to begin with that your fantasy world is taking over, and hence it is in fact impossible to hurt you, any more than you constantly hurt yourself. this is also why you have to imagine what my day is like, and post your literally insane imagination. any remnant of sanity would have held you back from such levels of psychotic behavior.

you should consult a psychiatric ward and have yourself committed before you actually kill someone in your deranged, psychotic state, filled as you are with hatred and malice towards people who didn't stop hurting you when you screamed "please don't hurt me" to yourself, only.

the only thing I regret is that I didn't see your fantastic stupidity as a result of your shattered psychology -- it's fairly uncommon to be so fucking retarded because of a psychological problem, but clearly, you have been immensely stupid all your life, and now that I come and hurt your stupid feelings, so you turn on me like a vicious and mad dog -- and that's exactly what you are to me: a mad dog in need of a bullet through his sick brain before he actually manages to hurt someone or himself.

do the world a huge favor and commit suicide tonight.

on the surface, it was an attack on someone who disagreed with him, but in hindsight, I think it was actually a self critique.

You're missing something - context. They relished in trash talk, as can be seen in the tireless and pointless arguments. Janos Blazi enjoyed playing the part of Smurfet and Eric was equally passionate about his role - Gargamel. Watch the rest of the cast @ http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/...;

Btw if the quotes got you interested in the wisdom Erik Naggum has to offer, then the ever resourceful Xach Beane has a page for you - http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/ . The page contains Erik Naggums postings on comp.lang.lisp which have a very high signal to noise ratio. Bonus points - the listings can be browsed chronologically and can be searched.

It's hard to take people like Naggum very seriously when the languages they so self-righteously dismiss (C, C++, perl, Java) are used every day to build software at all scales of complexity and Lisp remains an essentially irrelevant niche.

He also completely misunderstands free software. It's not about giving things away for free. It's about sharing the grunt work so we can focus on doing new things.

Naggum is an extreme example of the somewhat common example of the grumpy old man that refuses to understand or accept change. You can find much better gurus if you want a guru.

This is the sort of thing someone might write if their entire exposure to Erik Naggum's writing was that single blog post.

Your summary is inaccurate.

I read Naggum's posts regularly on comp.lang.lisp for years. They always generated much more heat than light. He was entertaining but terribly misguided. I don't miss him.

I do kind of miss Xah Lee though.

Math remains an essentially irrelevant niche according to your definition of relevance - no of exponents. Lisp remains a great vehicle for exploring ideas and writing algorithmic code. Also in response to your other post, comparing Naggum to Xah is doing Erik a disservice in my opinion.

I like Lisp but ridiculous statements like this: Using such inferior languages is like asking a chef who could have done wonders with any kind of raw materials, to use a dirty kitchen, a broken refrigerator with food that is about to die a second time, broken tools, and brownish tap water that tasted of swamp land.

just fly in the face of all the available evidence. When I was new to Lisp I took bullshit like this at face value. This is a poisonous line of thinking I'd encourage all new programmers to avoid. Naggum was worse than Xah. As another poster in this thread pointed out, his shockingly intolerant vindictiveness and cruelty were disgusting. If you're looking for "wisdom" then keep walking.

Lisp has had the misfortune of attracting bright but nutty people like Naggum all along. It's held the language back quite a bit.

Don't forget - besides the exploration of algorithms dman mentioned - that languages such as Perl, Java, Ruby, Python, etc benefit from the experience and precedent of the Lisps. I'm always chagrined when I see the kids in some popular language community pretending like some 40-year-old technique is new and brought to the table by their favorite toy. But at least usually the heritage is respected and mistakes avoided by looking to the examples provided by the Lisps.

Such languages often gladly borrow ideas introduced by Lisps and make them available to larger groups of people. While the world would be a very different place if more people used Lisp than other languages, half a century of history suggest that that will not happen soon.

Erik Naggum and Kurt Vonnegut are the two people that I respect most for their free thinking.

  At least one really huge software 
  company has made the bulk of its earnings on its ability to demonstrate 
  to other people that the real users what they could do. 

  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 ... the best troll ever :)

I feel uncertain about how much wisdom there is in a post about "Microshit".

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