Eric S. Raymond quotes - page 2

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)
...and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language. View quote
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. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
The case for dumping iPhone, or at least threatening to do so in order to renegotiate Apple's subsidy requirement away, seems pretty open and shut. Apple has things all its own way right now - skimming the lion's share of the profits off the carriers' business without having to shoulder their risks. But this is an unstable situation, because the carriers' investors won't tolerate it indefinitely. What happens when they revolt? View quote
Eric S. Raymond
Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
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. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you. View quote
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)
Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
Microsoft is not the problem. Microsoft is the symptom. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them. View quote
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 monopolies, or will it go to developers and users?. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network. (Eric S. Raymond)
A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
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. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature. View quote
Eric S. Raymond