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.
When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world
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
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.
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 next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.
Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
I believe, but cannot prove, that global “AIDS” is a whole cluster of unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as the sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal blunders in the history of medicine.
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!
Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only error to have ruined more designs than feature creep. From tortured code to incomprehensible data layouts, the results of obsessing about speed or memory or disk usage at the expense of transparency and simplicity are everywhere. They spawn innumerable bugs and cost millions of man-hours - often, just to get marginal gains in the use of some resource much less expensive than debugging time
A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
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?.
When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time
Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry
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.
Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.
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.
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.
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.
Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.
The Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.
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