Eric S. Raymond

1957– · American programmer & open source advocate

Topics: software engineering, open source, programming, learning

• Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

  — Eric S. Raymond

• When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.

  — Eric S. Raymond

• It is well understood in the community that project owners have a duty to pass projects to competent successors when they are no longer willing or able to invest needed time in development or maintenance work.

  — Eric S. Raymond

• Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).

  — Eric S. Raymond

• Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.

  — Eric S. Raymond

• 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.

  — Eric S. Raymond

• Don't forget to have fun. That drive to experiment, to try things, to have fun, to be playful, that is what will sustain your creativity over the long term. Don't lose that.

  — Eric S. Raymond

• Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.

  — Eric S. Raymond

• At any sufficient scale, those who do not have automatic memory management in their language are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

  — Eric S. Raymond

• Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it.

  — Eric S. Raymond