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

More quotes by Eric S. Raymond

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For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.
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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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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Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry
Eric S. Raymond
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Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
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.
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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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 easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user
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.
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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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?.
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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Programmer time is expensive conserve it in preference to machine time
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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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.
Eric S. Raymond
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Why the hell hasn't wxPython become the standard GUI for Python yet?
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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With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.
Eric S. Raymond
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If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
Eric S. Raymond