Eric S. Raymond Quotes

The problem is, in software design, often the consequences of your decisions don't become apparent for years.

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.

Creeping featurism is a disease, fatal if not treated promptly. There are some cures, but, as usual, the best approach is to practice preventative medicine.

Law Number XV: The last 10 percent of performance generates one-third of the cost and two-thirds of the problems.

It's easy to make mistakes that only come out much later, after you've already implemented a lot of code. You'll realize Oh I should have used a different type of data structure. Start over from scratch.

Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another's code; too little and expressiveness is endangered.

I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.

My goal is for a cooperative world at peace, using its resources to build, not to destroy.

I am myself impressed by the great social advantages of increasing the stock of capital until it ceases to be scarce.

Victory favors the team making the fewest mistakes.

I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics.

We acknowledge-now with President Obama-that we have made mistakes in the United States, and we along with other developed countries have contributed most significantly to the problem we face with climate change.

I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.

Little bits of things make me do it; — perhaps a word that I said and ought not to have said ten years ago; — the most ordinary little mistakes, even my own past thoughts to myself about the merest trifles. They are always making me shiver.

We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code.

The important point is that the cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. Sure, any given feature list can be implemented, given enough coding time. But in addition to coming out late, you will usually wind up with a codebase that is so fragile that new ideas that should be dead-simple wind up taking longer and longer to work into the tangled existing web. The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other.

Poverty - the greatest cause of human suffering on the planet - is itself exacerbated by conflict, competition for resources, injustice, even the global downturn and climate change. Diseases like AIDS, TB and malaria cannot be tackled without adequate resources. So you see everything is connected. In order to address any major cause of human suffering, we have to work together across many fronts.

Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers. It's easy to get sucked into an infrastructure rewrite death spiral.

Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of.

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.

Good code is its own best documentation.

It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today!

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

Once you figure out something about the watershed, you'll find out where the schools are going to hell, and the kids aren't learning, and there is no money. Social issues, class issues, and environmental issues were all connected.