Eric S. Raymond Quotes

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

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

In 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.

The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.

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

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

I 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.

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

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.

It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature

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

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