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
believe medicine political
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.
winning select free-market
Free markets select for winning solutions.
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.
python hell standards
Why the hell hasn't wxPython become the standard GUI for Python yet?
knowledge keeping-secrets alchemist
Alchemists turned into chemists when they stopped keeping secrets.
ideas next sometimes
The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
fall writing simple
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 by well-defined interfaces, so that most problems are local and you can have some hope of fixing or optimizing a part without breaking the whole
powerful thinking years
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.
becoming treats programming
If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
years culture mit
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.
car able computer
Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.
debugging improvement programming
Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
empires rebel hackers
Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.
responsibility gun want
When I hear the words social responsibility, I want to reach for my gun.