Eric S. Raymond Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

Alchemists turned into chemists when they stopped keeping secrets.

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

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).

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

Microsoft is not the problem. Microsoft is the symptom.

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

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.

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

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.

Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.

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

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.

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

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

With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.

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

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

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

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.

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