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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: 66
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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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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Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
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Programmer time is expensive conserve it in preference to machine time
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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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Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
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Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.
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With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.
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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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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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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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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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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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Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.
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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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Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.
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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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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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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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