Programming Quotes by Eric S. Raymond

Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time

— Eric S. Raymond

Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.

— Eric S. Raymond

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

— Eric S. Raymond

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

— Eric S. Raymond

In the beginning, there were Real Programmers.

— Eric S. Raymond

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.

— Eric S. Raymond

“Brook’s Law: “Adding more programmers to a late project makes it later.”

— Eric S. Raymond

With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.

— 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

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

— Eric S. Raymond

“We’re proving not only that we can do better software, but that joy is an asset.”

— Eric S. Raymond

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

— 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

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

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

— Eric S. Raymond

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

— Eric S. Raymond

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…

— Eric S. Raymond

On first blush this looks to be about money, but it is about power. Is power going to go to the information…

— Eric S. Raymond

“For purposes of examining the software market itself, it will be helpful to sort kinds of software by how completely the service…

— 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…

— 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…

— Eric S. Raymond

A software system is transparent when you can look at it and immediately see what is going on. It is simple when…

— Eric S. Raymond

Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the…

— Eric S. Raymond

When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible - and never throw…

— Eric S. Raymond

When are programmers happy? They're happy when they're not underutilized - when they're not bored - and also when they're not overburdened…

— Eric S. Raymond

“In a future that includes competition from open source, we can expect that the eventual destiny of any software technology will be…

— Eric S. Raymond

“Indeed, it seems the prescription for highest software productivity is almost a Zen paradox; if you want the most efficient production, you…

— Eric S. Raymond

Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans)…

— Eric S. Raymond

Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only error to have ruined more designs than feature creep. From…

— Eric S. Raymond

“The reason this is a serious issue is that both the pool of users and the pool of talent available to be…

— Eric S. Raymond

“If (as is generally accepted) over 75% of a typical software project’s life-cycle costs will be in maintenance and debugging and extensions,…

— Eric S. Raymond

“Amabile goes on to observe that “The more complex the activity, the more it’s hurt by extrinsic reward.” Interestingly, the studies suggest…

— Eric S. Raymond

“There is another kind of skill not normally associated with software development which I think is as important as design cleverness to…

— Eric S. Raymond

“The history of Unix should have prepared us for what we’re learning from Linux (and what I’ve verified experimentally on a smaller…

— 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

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

— Eric S. Raymond

The central problem of C and C++ is that they require programmers to do their own memory management

— 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

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

— Eric S. Raymond

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

— Eric S. Raymond