Eric S. Raymond Quotes
- Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.
- 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 first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier…
- 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…
- Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.
- Why the hell hasn't wxPython become the standard GUI for Python yet?
- In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact…
- Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
- 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…
- Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)
- The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user
- Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world
- Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry
- 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…
- 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 course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed…
- Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it
- 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…
- Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time
- The central problem of C and C++ is that they require programmers to do their own memory management