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..

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….

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

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

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

Alchemists turned into chemists when they stopped keeping secrets..

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

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better progra….

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

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

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 confusi….

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

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 fee….

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

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

With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow..

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 en….

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

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….

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….

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