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Eric S. Raymond

Eric S. Raymond Books

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“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.”

WayDifferentNumbersHugeInternetDifferent WaysVolunteerLinuxHackedHuge NumbersCoordinating
Book:The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary
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“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.)”

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Author:Eric S. Raymond
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“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 confusing people who are stuffier and less mentally agile than we are, especially when they're bosses. There's a little bit of the mad scientist in all hackers, ready to discombobulate the world and flip authority the finger - especially if we can do it with snazzy special effects.”

PeopleIfsWorldLooksLittlesLanguageFunBitsCan DoSpecialEffectsReadyAuthorityLittle BitScientistMadFingersIncludingBunchBossConfusingDeep DownFlipHacksPunHackersSpecial EffectsMad Scientist
Author:Eric S. Raymond
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“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.”

BelieveHas BeensReasonWholePoliticalI BelieveProveDiseaseMedicineAidsSoleHivIdentificationBlundersColossalClustersHistory Of MedicinePathogens
Author:Eric S. Raymond
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“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.”

IfsUseEnlightenmentProfoundProgrammersLisp
Book:The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary
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“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.”

YearsFirstsHomeIndividualTalkingEnvironmentDevelopmentInternetTenCapableFirst TimeCapacityMachinesEnginesStorageHackersUnix
Book:The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary
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“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.”

ThinkingWayYearsStillsFactsTodayLanguagePowerfulCreativeFiveDesignMajorsTwentiesRemainsFactorsFive YearsUnusualFlexibleTwenty FiveHackersLisp
Author:Eric S. Raymond
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“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”

MenMayUseHoursMemoriesResultsKnownMillionsDesignCostGainsResourcesErrorsSimplicitySpeedDataCodeFeaturesExpensiveExpensesRuinedBugsTransparencyCreepsRushingUsageSpawnObsessingDiskLayoutDebuggingBottlenecks
Book:The Art of UNIX Programming
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“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.”

WayWritingHumansHardLanguageProcessAbilityLearningProgramSimplicityUglyCodeBridgesPerceiveRelatedComplexityProgrammingCollapseEngineersElegantLiableSuspension
Author:Eric S. Raymond
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