Jamie Zawinski

1968– · American programmer

Topics: programming, software engineering, software design, open source

• You can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of "open source," and have everything magically work out.

  — Jamie Zawinski

• C (it's not just a language, it's a grade)

  — Jamie Zawinski

• Linux is only free if your time has no value.

  — Jamie Zawinski

• Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.

  — Jamie Zawinski

• Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

  — Jamie Zawinski

• If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

  — Jamie Zawinski

• Browser compatibility problems are nature's way of saying "stop trying to be so fuckin' clever".

  — Jamie Zawinski

• Your needs are big because the Internet is big.

  — Jamie Zawinski

• [Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.

  — Jamie Zawinski

• Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use sed." Now they have two problems.

  — Jamie Zawinski

• Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.

  — Jamie Zawinski

• Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

  — Jamie Zawinski

• I'd just like to take this moment to point out that C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string.

  — Jamie Zawinski

• Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

  — Jamie Zawinski

• Self hosting email is like pounding needles into your eyes. You should never do that. Pay someone else to pound those needles so you can just lie back and enjoy it.

  — Jamie Zawinski

• The real bug here is that the design of the system even permits this class of bug. It is unconscionable that someone designing a critical piece of security infrastructure would design the system in such a way that it does not fail safe.

  — Jamie Zawinski