Top 50 Eric S. Raymond Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.”

— Eric S. Raymond

2. “Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.”

— Eric S. Raymond

3. “Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.”

— Eric S. Raymond

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4. “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.”

— Eric S. Raymond

5. “A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.”

— Eric S. Raymond

6. “If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.”

— Eric S. Raymond

7. “With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.”

— Eric S. Raymond

8. “To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.”

— Eric S. Raymond

9. “Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it.”

— Eric S. Raymond

10. “The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.”

— Eric S. Raymond

11. “You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion.”

— Eric S. Raymond

12. “Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world.”

— Eric S. Raymond

13. “Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.”

— Eric S. Raymond

14. “The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network.”

— Eric S. Raymond

15. “When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.”

— Eric S. Raymond

16. “When I hear the words social responsibility, I want to reach for my gun.”

— Eric S. Raymond

17. “Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.”

— Eric S. Raymond

18. “Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.”

— Eric S. Raymond

19. “The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.”

— Eric S. Raymond

20. “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

21. “Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time.”

— Eric S. Raymond

22. “The only way to write complex software that won’t fall on its face is to hold its global complexity down – to build it out of simple pieces connected by well-defined interfaces, so that most problems are local and you can have some hope of fixing or optimizing a part without breaking the whole.”

— Eric S. Raymond

23. “When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible – and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!”

— Eric S. Raymond

24. “The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user.”

— Eric S. Raymond

25. “When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.”

— Eric S. Raymond

26. “Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.”

— Eric S. Raymond

27. “Why the hell hasn’t wxPython become the standard GUI for Python yet?”

— Eric S. Raymond

28. “If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.”

— Eric S. Raymond

29. “Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.”

— Eric S. Raymond

30. “It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature.”

— Eric S. Raymond

31. “Microsoft is not the problem. Microsoft is the symptom.”

— Eric S. Raymond

32. “A software system is transparent when you can look at it and immediately see what is going on. It is simple when what is going on is uncomplicated enough for a human brain to reason about all the potential cases without strain.”

— Eric S. Raymond

33. “For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier – Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.”

— Eric S. Raymond

34. “Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.”

— Eric S. Raymond

35. “Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.”

— Eric S. Raymond

36. “Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.”

— Eric S. Raymond

37. “If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.”

— Eric S. Raymond

38. “That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color.”

— Eric S. Raymond

39. “Anyway, in a world of cheap PCs and fast Internet links, we find pretty consistently that the only really limiting resource is skilled attention.”

— Eric S. Raymond

40. “The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.”

— Eric S. Raymond

41. “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

42. “Python language is one example. As we noted above, it is also heavily used for mathematical and scientific papers, and will probably dominate that niche for some years yet. 18.3.3.”

— Eric S. Raymond

43. “Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet.”

— Eric S. Raymond

44. “Free markets select for winning solutions.”

— Eric S. Raymond

45. “Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.”

— Eric S. Raymond

46. “Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C.”

— Eric S. Raymond

47. “Transparency is therefore more than an esthetic triumph; it is a victory that will be reflected in lower costs throughout the software’s life cycle. 6.2.2.”

— Eric S. Raymond

48. “Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.”

— Eric S. Raymond

49. “In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe.”

— Eric S. Raymond

50. “There is a flip side to this. In the Unix world, libraries which are delivered as libraries should come with exerciser programs.”

— Eric S. Raymond