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Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.

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
Personal
Work
Every
Scratching
Good
Itch
Developers
Programming
Software
Starts

More quotes by Eric S. Raymond

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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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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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Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.
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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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The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.
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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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When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
Eric S. Raymond
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Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.
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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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Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.
Eric S. Raymond
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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.
Eric S. Raymond
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Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
Eric S. Raymond
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Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.
Eric S. Raymond
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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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The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user
Eric S. Raymond
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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.
Eric S. Raymond
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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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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.
Eric S. Raymond
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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.
Eric S. Raymond
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Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
Eric S. Raymond