Eric S. Raymond Quotes

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

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.

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

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 know, instinctively, that property is no mere social convention or game, but a critically important evolved mechanism for the avoidance of violence. (This makes them smarter than a good many human political theorists.)

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

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.

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

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.

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

It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature

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

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

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