Eric S. Raymond Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Eric S. Raymond

  Fun, People, Mad

  "Guest Editorial: World Domination". www.linuxjournal.com. January 1, 2000.

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• Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.

  Eric S. Raymond

  Homework, Substitutes

  "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way". huntersnk.com. September 30, 2016.

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

  Eric S. Raymond

  Hands, Lasts, Program

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.26, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• 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

  Simple, Brain, Looks

  Eric S. Raymond (2003). “The Art of UNIX Programming”, p.19, Addison-Wesley Professional

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• 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

  Special, Pork, Asking

  "Neda Agha Soltan’s Death Inspires New Site". blogs.wsj.com. June 22, 2009.

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• 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

  Home, Talking, Years

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.13, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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

  Eric S. Raymond

  Ideas, Next, Sometimes

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.40, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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

  Eric S. Raymond

  Defeat, Internet, Free Speech

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

  Eric S. Raymond

  Machines, Preference, Programmers

  Eric S. Raymond (2003). “The Art of UNIX Programming”, p.22, Addison-Wesley Professional

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

  Eric S. Raymond

  Release, Programming, Customers

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.29, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• 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

  Pain, Writing, Data

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.44, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• 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.

  Eric S. Raymond

  Believe, Medicine, Political

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• 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

  Numbers, Volunteer, Different

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.16, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• 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

  Eric S. Raymond

  Memories, Men, Errors

  Eric S. Raymond (2003). “The Art of UNIX Programming”, p.23, Addison-Wesley Professional

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

  Eric S. Raymond

  Security Systems, Secret, Pseudo

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.46, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• 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

  Looks, Information, Firsts

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

  Eric S. Raymond

  Sugar, Language, Programming

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.46, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry

  Eric S. Raymond

  Delusion, Software, Persistent

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.120, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• 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

  Iphone, Shapes, Trouble

  "The Smartphone Wars: AT&T CEO reveals all". esr.ibiblio.org. January 27, 2011.

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

  Eric S. Raymond

  Rebel, Empires, Hackers

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.13, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• 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.

  Eric S. Raymond

  Writing, Learning, Bridges

  "Why Python?". www.linuxjournal.com. Apr 30, 2000.

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• 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

  Design, Heavyweights, Fleeing

  Eric S. Raymond (2003). “The Art of UNIX Programming”, p.182, Addison-Wesley Professional

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• 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

  Becoming, Resources, Treats

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.38, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• 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

  Years, Culture, Mit

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.4, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• 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

  Senior, Today, Linux

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