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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: 66
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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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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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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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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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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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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Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
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Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.
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If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
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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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Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.
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.
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It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature
Eric S. Raymond
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Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
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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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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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A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
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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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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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.
Eric S. Raymond