
Erik Naggum, 1965-2009 RIP - MaysonL
http://www.open-voip.com/blogs/blog1/2009/06/20/erik-naggum-1965-2009-rip
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thomasfl
Erik and I were colleges in the early nineties. Erik was a very nice person
when you met him in person, but completely different in emails.

Eight years ago, I wrote a small web application in perl for a Norwegian law
firm in Oslo. Erik had done some consulting for them, and was very friendly
when we discussed the project in meetings. But later he was exceptionally
harsh in his emails, saying among other things, that I had created some of the
biggest security holes he had ever seen.

He rewrote the web application himself in common lisp in a few hours. Creating
a framework for web apps on the way. I never invoiced the customer just to
avoid any further discussions with Erik.

Erik admitted however, that some of my code was a bit interesting. It was the
first time he saw code with unit tests.

His ideas for using lisp instead of xml was brilliant, and it's very said he's
gone.

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mynameishere
Am I alone in thinking this is guy is an object lesson in how not to live? Was
he just a usenet snark-generation unit? Because I've read all the obituaries,
and that seems to be the man's mortal summation.

As an extreme encomium, can anyone point to something he actually did?

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morphir
afaik he was not much of a contributor to the open source arena. He was
however one of very few lisp programmers who had a job, programming in lisp.
Someone pointed out that he wrote a billing system among other.

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mahmud
Anybody can be paid to write "lisp" for a living, just work closely with small
business owners and provide them with "software solutions". I have been a
working Lisper since 2001, pretty much since I bought Winston and Horn and
started replacing C++ with it, but I digress.

Naggum, RIP good fella.

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mlLK
His wisdom [<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum?>] will not be forgotten
as long as it is in text.

~~~
thomasfl
Incredibly witty and funny comments about programming.

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prodigal_erik
see also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666425>

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MaysonL
Yes - I didn't see that one until I'd submitted this - if I had, I wouldn't
have bothered (especially as this article is linked to in that thread).

