Erik Naggum on Knowledge

"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 the syntax is good enough for the information, it should be good enough for the meta-information."

"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."

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I regret that this isn't fatal."

"If you want to know why Lisp doesn't win around you, find a mirror."

"A word says more than a thousand images. Exercises for the visually inclined: illustrate "appreciation", "humor", "software", "education", "inalienable rights", "elegance", "fact."

"All experience has taught us that solving a complex problem uncovers hidden assumptions and ever more knowledge, trade-offs that we didn't anticipate but which can make the difference between meeting a deadline and going into research mode for a year, etc."

"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 a language!"

"Getting C programmers to understand that they cause the computer to do less than minimum is intractable. … Ask him why he thinks he should be able to get away with unsafe code, core dumps, viruses, buffer overruns, undetected errors, etc., just because he wants "speed."

"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."

"What people "want" is a function of what they learn is available. If you wish to sell something, you'd better understand that you can't give people what they want in the market today, because what they want today is what they can already get. You have to discover what they really want, and find some way to give that physical shape."

"More and more, people see that solving any problem is a question of acquiring knowledge and having respect for the cognitive and epistemological processes involved in the human brain: use what you know, learn what you can, and if you have to guess, be aware that you do so you can go back and update your guesses when you learn more."

"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."

"You become a serious programmer by going through a stage where you are fully aware of the degree to which you know the specification, meaning both the explicit and the tacit specification of your language and of your problem. "Hey, it works most of the time" is the very antithesis of a serious programmer, and certain languages can only support code like that."

"The Novice has been the focus of an alarming amount of attention in the computer field. It is not just that the preferred user is unskilled, it is that the whole field in its application rewards novices and punishes experts. What you learn today will be useless a few years hence, so why bother to study and know anything well? I think this is the main reason for the IT winter we are now experiencing."

"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."