Top 68 Eric S. Raymond Quotes
#1. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
Eric S. Raymond
#2. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
Eric S. Raymond
#3. Transparency is therefore more than an esthetic triumph; it is a victory that will be reflected in lower costs throughout the software's life cycle. 6.2.2
Eric S. Raymond
#4. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)
Eric S. Raymond
#5. And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I've got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome.
Eric S. Raymond
#6. 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!
Eric S. Raymond
#7. 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.
Eric S. Raymond
#8. 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.
Eric S. Raymond
#9. Does Facebook behave like a tool in my hand, or a firehose designed to spew at me in accordance with other peoples' agendas? Concretely: can I write my own client to present a filtered view of the Facebook stream, or have other people do that for me?
Eric S. Raymond
#10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
Eric S. Raymond
#11. CSV (fields separated by commas, double quotes used to escape commas, no continuation lines) is rarely found under Unix.
Eric S. Raymond
#12. 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.
Eric S. Raymond
#13. It's not all that important that you be able to originate brilliant ideas... The more important talent is to be able to recognize good ideas from other people.
Eric S. Raymond
#14. 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.
Eric S. Raymond
#15. When you feel the urge to design a complex binary file format, or a complex binary application protocol, it is generally wise to lie down until the feeling passes.
Eric S. Raymond
#16. Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C
Eric S. Raymond
#17. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
Eric S. Raymond
#18. 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.
Eric S. Raymond
#19. 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
Eric S. Raymond
#20. Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.
Eric S. Raymond
#21. 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.
Eric S. Raymond
#22. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.
Eric S. Raymond
#24. Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.
Eric S. Raymond
#25. 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
Eric S. Raymond
#26. The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.
Eric S. Raymond
#27. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
Eric S. Raymond
#28. There is a flip side to this. In the Unix world, libraries which are delivered as libraries should come with exerciser programs.
Eric S. Raymond
#29. Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.
Eric S. Raymond
#30. 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.
Eric S. Raymond
#31. Microsoft is not the problem. Microsoft is the symptom.
Eric S. Raymond
#32. Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world
Eric S. Raymond
#33. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
Eric S. Raymond
#34. People who study primate societies make a distinction between two kinds of cultural interactions, agonic and hedonic. In agonic societies, you gain status by asserting dominance over others. In hedonic societies, you gain status by drawing attention to yourself. Open source is a hedonic culture.
Eric S. Raymond
#35. Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it
Eric S. Raymond
#36. A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet.
Eric S. Raymond
#37. When the superior programmer refrains from coding, his force is felt for a thousand miles.
Eric S. Raymond
#38. Python language is one example. As we noted above, it is also heavily used for mathematical and scientific papers, and will probably dominate that niche for some years yet. 18.3.3
Eric S. Raymond
#39. As a Facebook user, do I have control of the data Facebook keeps about me? Concretely: can I examine and modify that data using tools of my choosing which are built for my needs?
Eric S. Raymond
#40. When I hear the words social responsibility, I want to reach for my gun.
Eric S. Raymond
#41. Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.
Eric S. Raymond
#42. 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.
Eric S. Raymond
#43. The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network.
Eric S. Raymond
#44. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
Eric S. Raymond
#46. 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.
Eric S. Raymond
#47. Alchemists turned into chemists
when they stopped keeping secrets.
Eric S. Raymond
#48. On first blush this looks to be about money, but it is about power. Is power going to go to the information monopolies, or will it go to developers and users?.
Eric S. Raymond
#49. Does Facebook act as though I own my online life, or as though it does? Concretely: Can I control what data it shares with other users, with advertisers, and with business partners?
Eric S. Raymond
#50. Why the hell hasn't wxPython become the standard GUI for Python yet?
Eric S. Raymond
#51. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
Eric S. Raymond
#52. Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time
Eric S. Raymond
#53. 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.
Eric S. Raymond
#54. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
Eric S. Raymond
#55. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion. That becomes more true the higher the skill level gets.
Eric S. Raymond
#56. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
Eric S. Raymond
#58. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
Eric S. Raymond
#59. The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user
Eric S. Raymond
#60. 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.
Eric S. Raymond
#61. Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers came near its owner's property has experienced the essential continuity between animal territoriality and human property. Our domesticated cousins of the wolf are instinctively smarter about this than a good many human political theorists.
Eric S. Raymond
#62. And we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++).
Eric S. Raymond
#63. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
Eric S. Raymond
#64. Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.
Eric S. Raymond
#66. The central problem of C and C++ is that they require programmers to do their own memory management
Eric S. Raymond
#67. 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.
Eric S. Raymond
#68. Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry
Eric S. Raymond
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