Explore Quotes by Eric S. Raymond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.

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.

Microsoft is not the problem. Microsoft is the symptom.

Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry

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

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

The central problem of C and C++ is that they require programmers to do their own memory management

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-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.