Erik Naggum

His premature death at the age of 44, On June 17, 2009, was caused by a massive bleeding ulcer, related to ulcerative colitis, which he was diagnosed with about 15 years before his death.

In a 1999 newspaper article in Dagbladet, he was interviewed about his aggressive, confrontational participation in Usenet discussion groups. Erik later stated his motto to be: "Some people are little more than herd animals, flocking together whenever the world becomes uncomfortable … I am not one of those people. If I had a motto, it would probably be Herd thither, me hither."

In 1995, Erik started a journalism watch-group project on the web, campaigning to get a journalist sacked from Aftenposten following the publication of a sensationalist story about how Internet Relay Chat channels were used to trade child pornography.

Erik Naggum was highly controversial. When he was passionate about something, which he was on many subjects, he eagerly and often harshly argued for his point of view. An example of this is his rant about XML being misdesigned and, especially, misused. One such example would be the diatribe against Martin Bryan posted in 1992. Erik Naggum hated Perl with a passion, and considered Perl to be a problem, not a problem solver. He disliked C++, though not as much as he hated Perl, but he generally thought that C++ was too difficult to understand to such a degree that only about 5 people on the planet truly understood it and hence it was of little value for humanity.

Erik Naggum (June 13, 1965 – June 17, 2009) was a Norwegian computer programmer recognized for his work in the fields of SGML, Emacs and Lisp. Since the early 1990s he was also a provocative participant on various Usenet discussion groups.