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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

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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
Manufacturing
Persistent
Largely
Delusion
Software
Service
Industry
Unfounded
Operating

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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.
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Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.
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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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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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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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Programmer time is expensive conserve it in preference to machine time
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The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user
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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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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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The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.
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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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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?.
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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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When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
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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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If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
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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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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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Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.
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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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