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

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
Way
Data
Simplicity
Structure
Smart
Works
Design
Structures
Around
Dumb
Better
Code

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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.
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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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Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.
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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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The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
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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.
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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.
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The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user
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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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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.
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Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
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Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.
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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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Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it
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Programmer time is expensive conserve it in preference to machine time
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Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry
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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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