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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
Personal
Work
Every
Scratching
Good
Itch
Developers
Programming
Software
Starts

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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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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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Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.
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Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
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Programmer time is expensive conserve it in preference to machine time
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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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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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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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Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it
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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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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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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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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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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.
Eric S. Raymond
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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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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.
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