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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.

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
Great
Uses
Way
Programming
Never
Tool
Useful
Expected
Tools
Truly
Use
Lends

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Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
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Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.
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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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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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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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The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
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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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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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Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
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The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.
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Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.
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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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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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It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature
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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 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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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).
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If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
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