Eric S. Raymond

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.

— Eric S. Raymond

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.

— Eric S. Raymond

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

— Eric S. Raymond

Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers came near its owner's property has experienced the essential continuity between animal territoriality and human property. Our domesticated cousins of the wolf are instinctively smarter about this than a good many human political theorists.

— 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

In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color.

— Eric S. Raymond

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

— Eric S. Raymond

...and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++).

— Eric S. Raymond

And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I’ve got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome.

— Eric S. Raymond

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

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

We hackers are a playful bunch; we'll hack anything, including language, if it looks like fun (thus our tropism for puns). Deep down, we like confusing people who are stuffier and less mentally agile than we are, especially when they're bosses. There's a little bit of the mad scientist in all hackers, ready to discombobulate the world and flip authority the finger — especially if we can do it with snazzy special effects.

— Eric S. Raymond

When I hear the words "social responsibility", I want to reach for my gun.

— Eric S. Raymond

The iPad is the ultimate Steve Jobs device – so hypnotic that not only do people buy one without knowing what it's good for, they keep feeling like they ought to use it even when they have better alternatives for everything it does. It's a triumph of style over substance, cool over utility, form over actual function.

— Eric S. Raymond

The iPhone brand is in worse shape than I thought was even possible. And the implications of that are huge. … The iPhone is in deep trouble.

— Eric S. Raymond

It has been quite humorous watching the acolytes of the iPhone sink into deeper and deeper denial as Android blows through obstacles at ever-accelerating speed. It would require an epic poet, or perhaps a psychiatrist specializing in religious mania, to do full justice to this topic.

— Eric S. Raymond

Apple is balancing on a knife edge. I think we're looking at the end stage of a successful technology disruption on the classic pattern. The question is no longer whether Android can be stopped, but when Apple's market share will fall off a cliff. I think that could easily happen as soon as the next 90 days.

— Eric S. Raymond

The case for dumping iPhone, or at least threatening to do so in order to renegotiate Apple's subsidy requirement away, seems pretty open and shut. Apple has things all its own way right now — skimming the lion's share of the profits off the carriers' business without having to shoulder their risks. But this is an unstable situation, because the carriers' investors won't tolerate it indefinitely. What happens when they revolt?

— Eric S. Raymond

People who make excuses for or actively advocate closed-source OSs and network software (and yes, Apple/iOS fanboys, I’m looking at you) are not merely harmlessly misguided cultists. They are enemies of liberty – enablers and accomplices before the fact in vendor schemes to spy on you, control you, and imprison you. Treat them, and the vendors they worship, accordingly.

— Eric S. Raymond

An Apple employee copied Sony's design, circulated it to his bosses, and testified to these facts in court. From now on, when anyone heaps phrase on Apple's design excellence and superlative innovation, just point and laugh. Some of us have been saying for years that what Apple is really good at is ripping off other peoples' ideas and stealing the credit for them with slick marketing. This, right here, is the proof.

— Eric S. Raymond

Android continues to stomp its competition flat. Even the post-Jobs Apple can't stem the tide; it's pretty close to the 10% niche market share I predicted back in 2009 already, with no sign that trend will or can be reversed.

— 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