Eric S. Raymond Quotations

As a Facebook user, do I have control of the data Facebook keeps about me? Concretely: can I examine and modify that data using tools of my choosing which are built for my needs?

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 - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When are programmers happy? They're happy when they're not underutilized - when they're not bored - and also when they're not overburdened with inappropriate specifications or meaningless bureaucracies. In other words, programmers are happiest when they're working efficiently. This is a general preference in creative work.

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.

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.

Does Facebook behave like a tool in my hand, or a firehose designed to spew at me in accordance with other peoples' agendas? Concretely: can I write my own client to present a filtered view of the Facebook stream, or have other people do that for me?

People are happiest when they're the most productive. People enjoy tasks, especially creative tasks, when the tasks are in the optimal-challenge zone: not too hard and not too easy. To some extent, that has always been true. But it becomes even more true as work becomes more about brains and creativity.

People who study primate societies make a distinction between two kinds of cultural interactions, agonic and hedonic. In agonic societies, you gain status by asserting dominance over others. In hedonic societies, you gain status by drawing attention to yourself. Open source is a hedonic culture.

Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion. That becomes more true the higher the skill level gets.

Does Facebook act as though I own my online life, or as though it does? Concretely: Can I control what data it shares with other users, with advertisers, and with business partners?

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

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

Worse, by the early 1990s it was becoming clear that ten years of effort to commercialize proprietary Unix was ending in failure.

Traditionally, operating systems had been written in tight assembler to extract the absolute highest efficiency possible out of their host machines.

Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.

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

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

Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.

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!

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.

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

Microsoft is not the problem. Microsoft is the symptom.

With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.

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

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

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

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 that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color.

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

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

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

It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature

That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color.

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

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

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?.

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.

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

And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I've got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome.

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.

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.

Free markets select for winning solutions.

Why the hell hasn't wxPython become the standard GUI for Python yet?

Alchemists turned into chemists when they stopped keeping secrets.

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

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

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.

If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.

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

When I hear the words social responsibility, I want to reach for my gun.

Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.

The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user

Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it

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 on is uncomplicated enough for a human brain to reason about all the potential cases without strain

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.

We hackers are a playful bunch; we'll hack anything, including language, if it looks like fun (thus our tropism for puns). Deep down, we like confusing people who are stuffier and less mentally agile than we are, especially when they're bosses. There's a little bit of the mad scientist in all hackers, ready to discombobulate the world and flip authority the finger - especially if we can do it with snazzy special effects.

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

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.

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

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.

You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion.

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

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 quickly and the fix obvious to someone).

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

Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.