Erik Naggum, RIP (2009)
open.salon.com
open.salon.com
We always respected him, because he was mostly right in his endless and beautiful posts to comp.lang.lisp. He used the emacs news reader with block aligned paragraphs. But it was also a bit threatening to newbies, because he easily lost his control with them. I rarely dared to ask something. Similar to other famous figures in SW mailinglists. I know of 2 others, who I also highly respect. Just because they were always right and their code was beautiful.
His posts were so famous, someone even made a searchable archive out of it: http://xach.com/naggum/articles/
#<Erik>
-- sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from irony
It wasn't just newbies. He came across like a completely different person in email vs live and in person. I never once saw him lose his cool in front of someone. I saw it many, many times in public and private email.
As an aside, it's always strange to click on a link on some random site and see a photo I took.
If someone is pleasant in person, yet crass or cruel online—but 99% of our interaction with them is online—then I think their online persona is the real them, and their pleasant in-person demeanor is the fake.
It's well-known that people are generally multifaceted, and that, typically, different circumstances bring out different facets -- that's more general than the online/offline issue.
I never met Naggum in person, only online, so I have no personal theory about him.
It's not so much, 'how do you know?' as 'what difference does it make?'? If almost all of your encounters with them are cruel, the fact that they're kind offline is irrelevant. Most of the targets of their cruelty won't ever meet them offline, and so will only be exposed to their cruelty.
Although if you think about it, what sounds more believable—a genuinely nice person who spends most of their time treating people cruelly, or a nasty person who is afraid to show it when they have to face the target of their cruelty?
Both were the real him. Which may defy logic a tiny little bit, but human personalities aren't really bound by logic.
Just because we have contentious argument doesn't mean we don't like each other.
I also think he fell into a trap of bad behavior and he wasn't able to disconnect from it. Years before he died he disconnected from comp.lang.lisp. That seemed to be the only way he could change, and it meant not participating in conversations there.
I think it's just really a bad idea to have a large part of your legacy defined in usenet posts.
Here's his xml rant people pointed me to: http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html
XML is great but it's not exactly the deep end of the pool. I honestly don't understand why someone with his intelligence would bother with something like that if it generated such negativity.
Finally, at the end of the day, I think XML defined Erik Naggum more than the other way around.
But you need to know some context: Before the simple WWW there was the better web, with consistent client editing tools (Amadeus), where all your links and pages were in (HTP Hyper Text Protocol) database. The server part had builtin search, was stateful (sessions), and was overall just better.
The markup language to create those new rich formats (i.e. with links and media) was lisp based (DSSSL), and formatted down to the stupid formats we know now. Everybody thought who can you be so stupid to reinvent the wheel in such an insane way. But insanity prevailed, as usual.
The machines and SW environment were rich and good, he had a Sparc, and not so simple as the typical Windows 3 environment,
That's the world which was destroyed by the web (stateless simple servers without any features, stupid clients, stupid inconsistent "loose" markup) and its new language XML. The technical SGML and XML groups were considered the problem of the whole IT industry to Eric. LISP expressions were not only superior, condense, readable, we also had all the tools already to work with them. XML was a huge throwback. It was a political battle we lost. That's why he loved to go on and on like this on every occasion, when ever he found someone who seemed to be fond of the web, html, xml or those likes. Those stupid people destroyed our better LISP world.
He was a bully. An incredibly intelligent bully, who liked to pick on people he felt he was smarter than. And in most cases, he probably actually was smarter than them, which made it feel justified in his mind.
This place could use some open criticism and degradation. Any criticism of ridiculous start-ups or bad science is criticized for not being open-minded, for ridiculing someone's life's work. Well, sometimes it's deserved.
There is already too much rudeness and this should be downvoted (and flagged if needed). It's weird to call such downvoting wimpy.