Erik Naggum

Lisp has it done right (recommended reading for all): http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html

Obligatory Erik Naggum essay -- possibly his best ever: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html

Tangential, but one of the best sources I've seen on issues with times and dates is Eric Naggum's "The Long, Painful History of Time". http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html Notably, besides outlining the complexity of the domain, the article also serves as explanation of decisions made by author in implementing local-time, a popular date/time library for Common Lisp.

Working through it, thanks. The link in the paper's headers is still live: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html The home page refers to his ill health: http://naggum.no/ And he in fact died in 2009 at 44: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum Interesting guy, involved in specifying the Internet from link level to mid-email level, worked on Emacs, and among the first Usenet users to be known for flaming. I vaguely remember the name in that context. On balance, a contributor.

Yeah, this list is woefully incomplete. Here's another good read: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html

And yet another good read is Erik Naggum's "The Long, Painful History of Time" http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html which describes better way for storing date(time)?s.

Erik Naggum's paper The Long, Painful History of Time is a must-read: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html

My favorite title for a paper is "Dating events in the vicinity of a leap second: (pdf) http://tf.nist.gov/timefreq/general/pdf/1788.pdf. And for more interesting detail, see http://www.nist.gov/index.html searching for UT0 UT1 and UT2. And for a bit of history, albeit somewhat painful, see http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html.

Age ~44? What are the oblique references to his declining health related to? (" I am unable to keep my company in operation for health reasons, but it is one of those things I just cannot give up. Instead of being a commercial undertaking, it is now only a hobby. Until my health improves, which it might never do sufficiently" - http://naggum.no )

From his website, http://www.naggum.no/ "I am unable to keep my company in operation for health reasons, but it is one of those things I just cannot give up. Instead of being a commercial undertaking, it is now only a hobby. Until my health improves, which it might never do sufficiently, I am generally unable to accept programming projects, teaching opportunities, or requests to advise students, although I would really like to see what I can do if you would like my input." If you're looking for more of his, ahem, observations try his page on wikiquote : http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum

I like a lot of what Joel writes, but I profoundly disagree with him on this, and I'm not alone in my dislike of accidental complexity which, which I think is now an order of magnitude greater than essential complexity. So there is a "silver bullet". It just needs someone to bite it. The author of the article recognizes there's a problem, but is less clear on how to go about solving it. A clue is in this article by Erik Naggum: http://naggum.no/erik/complexity.html Dan Ingalls once wrote: "Operating System: An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one." What he meant is we should migrate the functionality of the operating system into the programming language. This is possible if there's a REPL or something similar, so no need for the shell or command line. The language should be image-based, so no need for a file system. So, a bit like Squeak, or a Lisp with a structure editor. There's still a gap between the processor and the language, which should be eliminated by making the processor run the language directly. This was done in Burroughs mainframes and Lisp machines. Further up the "stack", software such as word processors and web browsers are at present written entirely separately but have much in common and could share much of their code.

>I think it's an acceptance of reality. All of technological progress consists of refusing to roll over and "accept reality" - instead, attacking it and modifying it to suit our needs. >There is a phase change when systems become too complex for a single human to ever understand them in their entirety. This is how innovation dies. The disease is preventable: http://naggum.no/erik/complexity.html > To them, MySql is the hardware. Is it a bad thing? Yes! It is. A programmer's finite mental capacity for dealing with complexity is consumed by an ever-greater load of accidental complexity - inconsistencies in the medium learning about which teaches you nothing. They are holes in reality. The thing that made modern technology possible is that physics, chemistry, etc. do not have "bugs." A correctly set up experiment will yield the same results when done a week from now, in Australia, etc. And in the end, there are unifying principles governing it, which will explain everything that happened in a way that teaches you something permanent. A medium with "holes", like a buggy programming system, is a universe where "science does not work": http://xkcd.com/298/ > Some of them hopefully will dig down the stack Wading in sewage. > languages are not all that important This statement is true when the languages are all equally crippled - as they increasingly are, through their reliance on an ever-sinking foundation of 35-year-old rotting OS.

One could argue that a date is a region in spacetime. It starts at the dateline, spreads eastward, and ends at the dateline some 48 hours later. (Edit: 50 hours is closer to the truth. And one could quibble about the definition of “dateline”, as Samoa moved across it once.) Interesting take from 1999: Erik Naggum: The Long, Painful History of Time http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html

I think I've heard this before... "I believe the computer is the most significant tool invented, as it is unique in mechanizing part of the process of learning and understanding, or at least giving us that potential. All other tools have been extensions of muscles and limbs, whereas the computer is an extension of the brain, and it is that which we make of it." -- Erik Naggum, 1996-02-06 (http://naggum.no/erik/knowledge.html)

You might enjoy Naggum's A Long, Painful History of Time: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html

Since nobody else has mentioned this, an interesting essay on time by Erik Naggum; it was done with thought to implementing a time library for common-lisp, but should be readable for non-lisp users: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html

Be careful with introducing monetary rewards. Rewards can sometimes have weird psychological effects on people, and may actually lessen their willingness to contribute because the task comes to be seen more as "work" than pastime [1] . Small side-note : A special property of the Stackoverflow system is that the user's profile can actually gain a value on its own, by reflecting so well on the user that it can be included in a CV. This value is very difficult to recreate for most on-line communities. I believe that Stackoverflow profiles have become a new hunting ground for head hunters to find suitable candidates. [1] http://naggum.no/motivation.html

> hairy problems with numerous, poor implementations. I.e. a page on implementing a library for handling times and dates You could start with http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html

I knew him mostly through his usenet posts; he always seemed to have interesting opinions, often expressed very bluntly. I really like his essay, "The Long, Painful History of Time": http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html See also local-time, a common lisp package based on his ideas: http://common-lisp.net/project/local-time/

I happened to be at the 40th LISP anniversary conference 1998, with John McCarthy. Erann's JPL talk about the Remote Agent was by far the most interesting talk there, and I still consider it one of the best conference talks ever. I'd really like to see the slides being published. I also attended this famous "dinner with eric" at the same conference, actually sitting next to Eric and Erann was sitting on the other side: http://blog.rongarret.info/2009/06/my-dinner-with-erik.html I liked Eric a lot, and really enjoyed his troll interactions with Xah Lee, one of the most famous trolls ever. Unfortunately he didn't know exactly who to pick a fight with. Erann was clearly the wrong target. Erann hated it. But as outsiders who stayed out of those silly fights we learned a lot, what boils in a LISPer. XML especially. Or Windows. Or special variables: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.lisp/WRQkT572RQ0/OvN9X… A very good CLL thread btw. Most of the people agreed with Eric, even if Erann's proposal was very good. (I used his old name to be able to look things up. The name change happened much later, when Erann got married and choose a better name, Ron Garret.) PS: Eric said 99 in his lugm blog post, but I'm pretty sure it was 98. http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html PPS: I found some old RA material here: https://web.archive.org/web/19991014000627/http://www-aig.jpl.nasa.gov… but mostly for ESL (the control language), not the actual RA simulation and…

what the hell? this is not "just coming to lisp", it's something someone wrote as a personal hack. I upvoted it and commented to encourage more lispers to post here. Erik Naggum's essay on the subject is highly referenced and cited by people developing time and date libraries for other languages and systems: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html The premiere text on time and date algorithms IS written in Common Lisp: http://www.amazon.com/Calendrical-Calculations-Millennium-Edward-Reing… And here is a taste of what's out there; http://www.cliki.net/TIMER http://www.cliki.net/net-telent-date http://www.cliki.net/local-time http://www.cliki.net/Date-Calc http://www.cliki.net/cl-l10n