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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

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Eric S. Raymond
Age: 66
Born: 1957
Born: December 4
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Journalist
Lawyer
Programmer
Software Developer
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Eric Raymond
Eric Steven Raymond
ESR
Actually
Programmers
Use
Enlightenment
Experience
Profound
Better
Finally
Even
Worth
Make
Rest
Never
Learning
Lisp
Days
Programmer

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Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.
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If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
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Programmer time is expensive conserve it in preference to machine time
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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.
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The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user
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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.
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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.
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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).
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The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.
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Why the hell hasn't wxPython become the standard GUI for Python yet?
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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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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.
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Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
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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.
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Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
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Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.
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Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.
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The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
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A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
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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.
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