
Erik Naggum, R.I.P. - imgabe
http://open.salon.com/blog/kent_pitman/2009/06/24/erik_naggum_rip
======
anatoly
I don't know a way of saying the following without looking like an asshole,
considering the occasion.

If you find yourself admiring Naggum's acerbic wit and online presence, that's
fine. But please please look for ways to live your life so that when you die,
the fact will be discovered not because some irc channel regulars notice your
longer-than-usual absence.

Please try very hard to arrange that there are people in your life who you
love and who love you, and with whom you're in daily contact. People whose
fondest memory of you will be as a spouse, a parent or an intimate friend, and
not having been cursed by you to hell and back in flawless and elegant
English.

Many of us here can easily rationalize ourselves into writing a five-page
missive on a technical topic that will utterly demolish the sack of shit our
opponent is, at the same time making the merits of our cause blindingly
obvious to anyone with a three-octal-digits IQ. Please balance the time
investment for writing that five-page missive against the possibility of
spending that time on your family, or, if you're single, and then it's vastly
more important yet, on looking for a person of appropriate gender you'd really
like to spend time with.

Also, don't be the kind of person who's polite with others in face-to-face
conversation, and then appallingly rude to the same person in email or online
forums of any kind. You'll find it's easy to rationalize such behavior to
yourself by appealing to lofty principles. Don't.

The world is cold, and we'll all be dead in the long run. Please have someone
to hug and be stupidly sentimental with, and share some happiness with.

Thanks for listening, and sorry for being an asshole.

~~~
kragen
I am ambivalent about this. A friend of mine was found dead in his house last
year, a week or three after he died. Many of his closest friends had moved
away to other continents; others were trying to respect his desire for privacy
by not dropping in unannounced. He had his problems, but he was very well
loved. But it wasn't enough.

I agree with you that it's important that we live our lives in such a way as
to create happiness; I think it's okay whether the happiness is for ourselves
or for others.

But I think that the most effective way to do that is to carry forward the
advancement of human knowledge, because ignorance is the source of
unhappiness. It's worth depriving oneself of a bit of day-to-day pleasure if
that's what it takes to develop your capacities to the point where you can
make a real contribution. As usual, I want to point to Richard Hamming's "You
and Your Research":
<http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html>

~~~
anatoly
I'm sorry to hear about your friend.

I see, and appreciate, your link to Hamming's article and raise you Samuel
Beckett's _Krapp's Last Tape_ in counterbalance:
<https://www.msu.edu/~sullivan/BeckettKrapp.html>

~~~
zcrar70
That's a pretty depressing story, but very powerful, too, and a very effective
counterbalance.

------
gruseom
Pitman is right: people are contradictory.

In the Naggum thread the other day I criticized him for polarizing and
ultimately damaging the Lisp community. What I didn't say is that I almost
always enjoyed reading him, even at his most noxious. He was a master not only
of Common Lisp but of English, the latter to a degree surprising in a non-
native speaker (Norwegians routinely excel at it but he was over the top). And
through reading him I became fond of him, something that by no means always
happens. I'm not surprised to hear people say that he was a nice person.
People are contradictory.

~~~
kragen
I agree that people are contradictory and that Naggum was a master of CL and
English.

~~~
gruseom
I've been reading various things about Naggum that have appeared in the last
few days. It's changed my view of him. For example, I wouldn't write
"consummate intellectual bully" to describe him anymore. He was more subtle
than that (though his language was not) and had a kind of integrity that
bullies don't. I hadn't read enough of him to grok this, but recent posts by
his intelligent admirers caused me to take a deeper look. Truly a fascinating
character.

Online communication is a limited medium that is prone to feedback loops of
escalating misunderstanding. It's easy to slip into thinking that one is
talking to a computer rather than another human being because, in a way, one
is. At that point, why bother with anything other than the intellectual
satisfaction of formulating what you have to say in the sharpest, most
absolute way possible? Many of us are prone to this. Naggum took it to an
extreme. I still think there's something to criticize here, but perhaps not in
terms like nasty, cruel, etc. It has more to do with dissociation (as when the
cognitive apparatus becomes disconnected from emotional or other information).
Which is another something many of us are prone to.

One other point about Erik Naggum that deserves a little more attention than
it's gotten: during much of the time he was writing this stuff he was
suffering physically pretty badly. That's not an excuse, but it does change my
picture of what was going on there.

------
prodigal_erik
Worth the read just for "even the best of us sometimes make stupid mistakes
that it would be grossly unfair to believe were one's true nature". I would
never have expected to hear that from Naggum.

------
andreyf
I, for one, agree that the world is full of people, if not inherently stupid
and frustrating, then acting stupid in a frustrating way. They're everywhere -
teaching our kids in high schools, running our companies, writing the programs
I rely on to work. They're people who have gotten better at "satisfying the
practical aspects" (bullshitting their way through) instead of knowing what
they're doing. From the little I got to read of his ideas, I hope Erik would
have agreed, that with bullshitters, there is no appropriate discourse, and
the only phrase that comes closest is "Fuck You".

------
timmorgan
I don't know if this is a perfect representation of Erik's style, but his rant
on XML is an enjoyable read: <http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-
xmlrant.html>

Edit: I posted this because I am mostly unfamiliar with the man's life and
work, and enjoyed reading about him.

~~~
mcav
It was posted recently (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666611>). But
sometimes a lot of XML rantiness isn't a bad thing. <grin>

------
alanthonyc
A quote:

"The purpose of human existence is to learn and to understand as much as we
can of what came before us, so we can further the sum total of human knowledge
in our life. "

RIP

------
jcl
Collection of Naggum quotes:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152312>

~~~
staunch
"Some people are little more than herd animals, flocking together whenever the
world becomes uncomfortable for any reason, seeking the comfort of those who
agree with them, do not contradict them, and take care of their emotions. I am
not one of those people. If I had a motto, it would probably be Herd thither,
me hither."

Truly great.

------
jganetsk
Ulcerative colitis is a terrible disease. I could totally understand him being
a very irritable guy.

------
ananthrk
I posted this link earlier, but reading it again in this context makes more
sense

<http://www.well.com/user/nocebo/>

------
TweedHeads
Wandering around Naggum's web site I wonder what will happen to his work when
his domain expires?

What will happen to our work when we die?

Is there a place for people already gone where we can go and see their work as
they left it when they died? Kind of a graveyard but without the creepiness?

I would like to have access to all the work from [insert hacker name here], if
he makes it available, or if he so wishes in his will.

I wish my site would be up (not that I have one) forever for everybody to see,
and read, and copy, and do stuff with whatever I left.

Wishing somebody may finish whatever we left unfinished...

~~~
listic
That's the thought I was pondering for quite some time: eternal hosting. How
does one make the site eternally available?

It seems like service like this doesn't exist, possibly because nearly
everyone is lost in the current moment.

The serivce that I think of should be something like cryonics. Well, not
exactly. Cryonics suspends human beings for indefinite period of time in hopes
of time being in hopes for future resuscitation. Eternal hosting should keep
site alive, just not updated by the author anymore. But the problem is similar
in both cases: how to preserve something valuable for indefinite period of
time with maximum probability, no breakage and no author's intervention, to
the best of our estimates and technological ability.

Seems like our society doesn't have services designed for eternity.

~~~
dan_the_welder
<http://www.youvebeenleftbehind.com>

"Services Overview

We have set up a system to send documents by the email, to the addresses you
provide, 6 days after the "Rapture" of the Church. This occurs when 3 of our 5
team members scattered around the U.S fail to log in over a 3 day period.
Another 3 days are given to fail safe any false triggering of the system."

Except it emails a zipped copy of your online stuff to a trusted second party.

I call it "Ivecheckedout.com"

Ahahhahahaha I love the intarwebs.

