When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend. Eric S. Raymond More Quotes by Eric S. Raymond More Quotes From Eric S. Raymond 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 heavyweights fleeing design 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 Eric S. Raymond simple writing fall 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 powerful years thinking With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. Eric S. Raymond bugs eye enough The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better. Eric S. Raymond next sometimes ideas If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource. Eric S. Raymond treats resources becoming Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Eric S. Raymond computer car able 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. Eric S. Raymond iphone shapes trouble The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1. Eric S. Raymond mit culture years Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging. Eric S. Raymond debugging programming improvement 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 learning bridges writing Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer. Eric S. Raymond linux senior today Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework. Eric S. Raymond homework substitutes Free markets select for winning solutions. Eric S. Raymond free-market select winning I believe, but cannot prove, that global “AIDS” is a whole cluster of unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as the sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal blunders in the history of medicine. Eric S. Raymond medicine political believe 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. Eric S. Raymond implementation language Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers came near its owner's property has experienced the essential continuity between animal territoriality and human property. Our domesticated cousins of the wolf know, instinctively, that property is no mere social convention or game, but a critically important evolved mechanism for the avoidance of violence. (This makes them smarter than a good many human political theorists.) Eric S. Raymond cousin dog animal 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 information looks firsts In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe. Eric S. Raymond stories might thinking The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers. Eric S. Raymond machines class world
