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.
Eric S. RaymondGiven 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).
Eric S. RaymondAnd 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.
Eric S. RaymondIf 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. RaymondRushing 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
Eric S. RaymondYou 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.
Eric S. RaymondComputer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.
Eric S. RaymondIn 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.
Eric S. RaymondUgly 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.
Eric S. RaymondTreating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
Eric S. RaymondWhen 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. RaymondThe 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. RaymondLisp 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. RaymondThe 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. RaymondEqually, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.
Eric S. RaymondIn 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. RaymondThe Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.
Eric S. RaymondThe next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
Eric S. RaymondWhen your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
Eric S. RaymondA 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
Eric S. RaymondWe 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.
Eric S. RaymondBeing able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.
Eric S. RaymondThe easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user
Eric S. RaymondI 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.
Eric S. RaymondWhen you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
Eric S. RaymondLinux 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. RaymondIf you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
Eric S. RaymondThe central problem of C and C++ is that they require programmers to do their own memory management
Eric S. RaymondThompson 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. RaymondTo solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
Eric S. RaymondSoftware is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry
Eric S. RaymondThe workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.
Eric S. Raymond