Eric S. Raymond Quotes About Design

• Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.

  →

  Eric S. Raymond

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.37, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

  439

• 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

  1966

• 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

  Eric S. Raymond (2003). “The Art of UNIX Programming”, p.182, Addison-Wesley Professional

  1685

• Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only error to have ruined more designs than feature creep. From tortured code to incomprehensible data layouts, the results of obsessing about speed or memory or disk usage at the expense of transparency and simplicity are everywhere. They spawn innumerable bugs and cost millions of man-hours - often, just to get marginal gains in the use of some resource much less expensive than debugging time

  →

  Eric S. Raymond

  Eric S. Raymond (2003). “The Art of UNIX Programming”, p.23, Addison-Wesley Professional

  1199

You May Also Like:

Kevin Poulsen

Edsger Dijkstra

Miguel de Icaza

Bill Gates

Guido van Rossum

Ken Thompson

Jamie Zawinski

Guy Steele