Eric S. Raymond: Good

Eric S. Raymond is American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement. Explore interesting quotes on good.
Eric S. Raymond: 44 quotes0 likes

“Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite”

Eric S. Raymond book The Cathedral and the Bazaar

and reuse
The Cathedral and the Bazaar

“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

Apple, postmodern consumerism and the iPad http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1931 in Armed and Dangerous (22 April 2010)

“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 book Homesteading the Noosphere

Homesteading the Noosphere

“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

The Smartphone Wars: The iPhone Design Was Inspired by Sony http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4479 in Armed and Dangerous (20 July 2012)

“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 book The Art of Unix Programming

The Art of Unix Programming: Unix and Object-Oriented Languages, Eric S. Raymond, 2003, 2014-08-06 http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/unix_and_oo.html,

“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? http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882