Eric S Raymond - Collected Quotes

"Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite." (Eric S Raymond, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", 1999)

"If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you." (Eric S Raymond, "The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary", 1999)

"Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong." (Eric S Raymond, "The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary", 1999)

"Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around." (Eric S Raymond, "The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary", 1999)

"Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry." (Eric S Raymond, "The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary", 1999)

"The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better." (Eric S Raymond, "The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary", 1999)

"To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you." (Eric S Raymond, "The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary", 1999)

"Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging." (Eric S Raymond, "The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary", 1999)

"When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible - and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!" (Eric S Raymond, "The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary", 1999)

"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." (Eric S. Raymond, "Why Python?", Linux Journal, 2000)

"A software system is transparent when you can look at it and immediately see what is going on. It is simple when what is going on is uncomplicated enough for a human brain to reason about all the potential cases without strain." (Eric S Raymond, "The Art of UNIX Programming", 2003)

"All OO languages show some tendency to suck programmers into the trap of excessive layering. Object frameworks and object browsers are not a substitute for good design or documentation, but they often get treated as one. Too many layers destroy transparency: It becomes too difficult to see down through them and mentally model what the code is actually doing. The Rules of Simplicity, Clarity, and Transparency get violated wholesale, and the result is code full of obscure bugs and continuing maintenance problems." (Eric S. Raymond, "The Art of Unix Programming", 2003)

"Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time." (Eric S Raymond, "The Art of UNIX Programming", 2003)

"The combination of threads, remote-procedure-call interfaces, and heavyweight object-oriented design is especially dangerous [...] if you are ever invited onto a project that is supposed to feature all three, fleeing in terror might well be an appropriate reaction." (Eric S Raymond, "The Art of UNIX Programming", 2003)

"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." (Eric S Raymond, "The Art of UNIX Programming", 2003)