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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: 66
Born: 1957
Born: December 4
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Journalist
Lawyer
Programmer
Software Developer
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Eric Raymond
Eric Steven Raymond
ESR
Work
Every
Scratching
Good
Itch
Developers
Programming
Software
Starts
Personal

More quotes by Eric S. Raymond

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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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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 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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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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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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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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The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user
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Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.
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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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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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Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.
Eric S. Raymond
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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.
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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The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.
Eric S. Raymond
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A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
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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Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
Eric S. Raymond
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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).
Eric S. Raymond
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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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Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.
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