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Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it

Eric S. Raymond

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Eric S. Raymond
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: December 4
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Journalist
Lawyer
Programmer
Software Developer
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Eric Raymond
Eric Steven Raymond
ESR
Working
Optimize
Prototype
Polish

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Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.
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With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.
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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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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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The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.
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If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
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Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
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Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
Eric S. Raymond
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It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature
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Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
Eric S. Raymond
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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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