Eric S. Raymond Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 know, instinctively, that property is no mere social convention or game, but a critically important evolved mechanism for the avoidance of violence. (This makes them smarter than a good many human political theorists.)

Free markets select for winning solutions.

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