Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry Eric S. Raymond More Quotes by Eric S. Raymond More Quotes From Eric S. Raymond The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network. Eric S. Raymond computer speed firsts 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 volunteer different numbers When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend. Eric S. Raymond programming sugar language 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 Eric S. Raymond layers alternatives language 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 errors men memories Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time Eric S. Raymond preference programmers machines The central problem of C and C++ is that they require programmers to do their own memory management Eric S. Raymond problem management memories It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature Eric S. Raymond hackers cat That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color. Eric S. Raymond skin-color independent stupid Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch. Eric S. Raymond programming very-good good-work If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them. Eric S. Raymond machines different faces Microsoft is not the problem. Microsoft is the symptom. Eric S. Raymond symptoms microsoft problem A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets. Eric S. Raymond security-systems pseudo secret Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers. Eric S. Raymond programming release customers Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong. Eric S. Raymond programming realizing problem When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible - and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to! Eric S. Raymond data pain writing 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. Eric S. Raymond communication development coercion To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you. Eric S. Raymond programming problem interesting When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor. Eric S. Raymond program lasts hands 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. Eric S. Raymond ethics able giving
