Eric S. Raymond
Eric S. Raymond
Eric Steven Raymond, often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, author of the widely cited 1997 essay and 1999 book The Cathedral and the Bazaar and other works, and open-source software advocate. He wrote a guidebook for the Roguelike game NetHack. In the 1990s, he edited and updated the Jargon File, currently in print as the The New Hacker's Dictionary...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth4 December 1957
CountryUnited States of America
use way tools
Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
numbers volunteer way
Linux 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.
layers alternatives language
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
delusion software persistent
Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry
stupid independent thinking
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.
knowledge keeping-secrets alchemist
Alchemists turned into chemists when they stopped keeping secrets.
python hell standards
Why the hell hasn't wxPython become the standard GUI for Python yet?
home talking years
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.
giving able ethics
A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet.
empires rebel hackers
Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.
polish prototype
Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it
memories men data
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
machines preference expensive
Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time
homework substitutes
Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.