Eric S. Raymond Quotes
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Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it
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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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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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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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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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Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time
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Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.
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Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.
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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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We hackers are a playful bunch; we'll hack anything, including language, if it looks like fun (thus our tropism for puns). Deep down, we like confusing people who are stuffier and less mentally agile than we are, especially when they're bosses. There's a little bit of the mad scientist in all hackers, ready to discombobulate the world and flip authority the finger - especially if we can do it with snazzy special effects.
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The iPhone brand is in worse shape than I thought was even possible. And the implications of that are huge... The iPhone is in deep trouble.
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A software system is transparent when you can look at it and immediately see what is going on. It is simple when what is going on is uncomplicated enough for a human brain to reason about all the potential cases without strain
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Microsoft is not the problem. Microsoft is the symptom.
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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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The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
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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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Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
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Why the hell hasn't wxPython become the standard GUI for Python yet?
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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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To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
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The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.
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It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature
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Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
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That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color.
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If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
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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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A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet.
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The only way to write complex software that won't fall on its face is to hold its global complexity down - to build it out of simple pieces connected by well-defined interfaces, so that most problems are local and you can have some hope of fixing or optimizing a part without breaking the whole
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Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.
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Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry
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