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
sugar language programming
When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
interesting problem programming
To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
problem realizing programming
Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
programming release customers
Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
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If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
debugging improvement programming
Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
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Worse, by the early 1990s it was becoming clear that ten years of effort to commercialize proprietary Unix was ending in failure.
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Traditionally, operating systems had been written in tight assembler to extract the absolute highest efficiency possible out of their host machines.
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Does Facebook act as though I own my online life, or as though it does? Concretely: Can I control what data it shares with other users, with advertisers, and with business partners?
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Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion. That becomes more true the higher the skill level gets.
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People who study primate societies make a distinction between two kinds of cultural interactions, agonic and hedonic. In agonic societies, you gain status by asserting dominance over others. In hedonic societies, you gain status by drawing attention to yourself. Open source is a hedonic culture.
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People are happiest when they're the most productive. People enjoy tasks, especially creative tasks, when the tasks are in the optimal-challenge zone: not too hard and not too easy. To some extent, that has always been true. But it becomes even more true as work becomes more about brains and creativity.
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Does Facebook behave like a tool in my hand, or a firehose designed to spew at me in accordance with other peoples' agendas? Concretely: can I write my own client to present a filtered view of the Facebook stream, or have other people do that for me?
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When are programmers happy? They're happy when they're not underutilized - when they're not bored - and also when they're not overburdened with inappropriate specifications or meaningless bureaucracies. In other words, programmers are happiest when they're working efficiently. This is a general preference in creative work.