Eric S. Raymond: Language

Eric S. Raymond is American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement. Explore interesting quotes on language.

Eric S. Raymond: 44 quotes0 likes

“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,

“…and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language”

Eric S. Raymond

C++ <br class="br"> emacs-devel http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-12/msg01268.html

“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

"Guest Editorial: World Domination," Linux Journal, 1 January 2000 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3676

“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

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

Eric S. Raymond

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7804 in Armed and Dangerous (18 December 2017)