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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
Largely
Delusion
Software
Service
Industry
Unfounded
Operating
Manufacturing
Persistent

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Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.
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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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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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Programmer time is expensive conserve it in preference to machine time
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Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.
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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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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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Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.
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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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Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C
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Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
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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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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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