Eric S. Raymond Quotes

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.

Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)

Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow (e.g., given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone).

If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.

We hackers are a playful bunch; we'll hack anything, including language, if it looks like fun (thus our tropism for puns). Deep down, we like confusing people who are stuffier and less mentally agile than we are, especially when they're bosses. There's a little bit of the mad scientist in all hackers, ready to discombobulate the world and flip authority the finger - especially if we can do it with snazzy special effects.

You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion.

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.

Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it

The combination of threads, remote-procedure-call interfaces, and heavyweight object-oriented design is especially dangerous... if you are ever invited onto a project that is supposed to feature all three, fleeing in terror might well be an appropriate reaction.

The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user

When I hear the words "social responsibility," I want to reach for my gun.

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.

Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

A software system is transparent when you can look at it and immediately see what is going on. It is simple when what is going on is uncomplicated enough for a human brain to reason about all the potential cases without strain

In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe.

To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.

Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature

Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.

Alchemists turned into chemists when they stopped keeping secrets.

The only way to write complex software that won't fall on its face is to hold its global complexity down - to build it out of simple pieces connected by well-defined interfaces, so that most problems are local and you can have some hope of fixing or optimizing a part without breaking the whole

Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.

The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network.

A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.

Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet.

When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible - and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!

The iPhone brand is in worse shape than I thought was even possible. And the implications of that are huge... The iPhone is in deep trouble.

Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.

Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.

When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.

Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.

If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.

In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color.

Why the hell hasn't wxPython become the standard GUI for Python yet?

Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.

Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

Free markets select for winning solutions.

Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.