Eric S. Raymond Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

Eric S. Raymond
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
When I hear the words "social responsibility", I want to reach for my gun.

Eric S. Raymond
It has been quite humorous watching the acolytes of the iPhone sink into deeper and deeper denial as Android blows through obstacles at ever-accelerating speed. It would require an epic poet, or perhaps a psychiatrist specializing in religious mania, to do full justice to this topic.

Eric S. Raymond
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 are instinctively smarter about this than a good many human political theorists.

Eric S. Raymond
People who make excuses for or actively advocate closed-source OSs and network software (and yes, Apple/iOS fanboys, I'm looking at you) are not merely harmlessly misguided cultists. They are enemies of liberty – enablers and accomplices before the fact in vendor schemes to spy on you, control you, and imprison you. Treat them, and the vendors they worship, accordingly.

Eric S. Raymond
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
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
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
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
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
A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.

Eric S. Raymond
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
To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.

Eric S. Raymond
When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.

Eric S. Raymond
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
Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

Eric S. Raymond
Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

Eric S. Raymond
The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.

Eric S. Raymond
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
The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network.

Eric S. Raymond
The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

Eric S. Raymond
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
If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.

Eric S. Raymond
Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.

Eric S. Raymond
Apple is balancing on a knife edge. I think we're looking at the end stage of a successful technology disruption on the classic pattern. The question is no longer whether Android can be stopped, but when Apple's market share will fall off a cliff. I think that could easily happen as soon as the next 90 days.

Eric S. Raymond
... and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++).

Eric S. Raymond
All OO languages show some tendency to suck programmers into the trap of excessive layering. Object frameworks and object browsers are not a substitute for good design or documentation, but they often get treated as one. Too many layers destroy transparency: It becomes too difficult to see down through them and mentally model what the code is actually doing. The Rules of Simplicity, Clarity, and Transparency get violated wholesale, and the result is code full of obscure bugs and continuing maintenance problems.

Eric S. Raymond
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
Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).

Eric S. Raymond