Programmers From The United States

"Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong."

"I hope, that in our archives and historical filings of the future, we do not allow the techie traditions of hierarchy and false regularity to be superimposed to the teeming, fantastic disorderlyness of human life."

"A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within 10 seconds."

"If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards."

"It is imperative for many reasons that the appalling gap between public and computer insider be closed. As the saying goes, war is too important to be left to the generals. Guardianship of the computer can no longer be left to a priesthood. I see this as just one example of the creeping evil of Professionalism, the control of aspects of society by cliques of insiders. There may be some chance, though, that Professionalism can be turned around. Doctors, for example, are being told that they no longer own people’s bodies. And this book may suggest to some computer professionals that their position should not be as sacrosanct as they have thought, either."

"In order for something to Catch On, it has to be standardized. Unfortunately, there is motivation for different companies to make their own little changes in order to restrict users to their own products. The best example of how to avoid this: Philips patented its audio cartridge [i.e. the standard audio "cassette"] to the teeth, but then granted everyone free use of the patent provided they adhered to the exact standard. The result has been the system's spectacular success, and Philips, rather than dominating a small market, has a share of a far larger market, and hence makes more money. That's a virtue-rewarded kind of story."

"I see Professionalism as a spreading disease of the present-day world, a sort of poly-oligarchy by which various groups (subway conductors, social workers, bricklayers) can bring things to a halt if their particular demands are not met. (Meanwhile, the irrelevance of each profession increases, in proportion to its increasing rigidity.) Such lucky groups demand more in each go-round - but meantime, the number who are permanently unemployed grows and grows."

"HOW TO LEARN ANYTHINGAs far as I can tell these are the techniques used by bright people who want to learn something other than by taking courses in it. [...]1. DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT TO LEARN. But you can't know this exactly, because you don't know exactly how any field is structured until you know all about it.2. READ EVERYTHING YOU CAN ON IT, especially what you enjoy, since that way you can read more of it and faster.3. GRAB FOR INSIGHTS. Regardless of points others are trying to make, when you recognize an insight that has meaning for you, make it your own [...] Its importance is not how central it is, but how clear and interesting and memorable to you. REMEMBER IT. Then go for another.4. TIE INSIGHTS TOGETHER. Soon you will have your own string of insights in a field. [...]5. CONCENTRATE ON MAGAZINES, NOT BOOKS. Magazines have far more insights per inch of text, and can be read much faster. But when a book really speaks to you, lavish attention on it.6. FIND YOUR OWN SPECIAL TOPICS, AND PURSUE THEM.7. GO TO CONVENTIONS. For some reason, conventions are a splendid concentrated way to learn things; talking to people helps. [...]8. "FIND YOUR MAN." Somewhere in the world is someone who will answer your questions extraordinarily well. If you find him, dog him. [...]9. KEEP IMPROVING YOUR QUESTIONS. Probably in your head there are questions that don't seem to line up with what your hearing. Don't assume that you don't understand; keep adjusting the questions till you get an answer that relates to what you wanted.10. YOUR FIELD IS BOUNDED WHERE YOU WANT IT TO BE. Just because others group and stereotype things in conventional ways does not mean they are necessarily right. Intellectual subjects are connected every which way; your field is what you think it is. [...]"

"Everybody has only a 24-hour day. Most people, if they increase consumption of one medium (like magazines or books) will cut down on another (like TV). This drastically reduces the sort of growth some people have been expecting."

"The next big thing is the one that makes the last big thing usable."

"I’m a firm believer in shades of gray."

"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."

"Good causes sometimes have bad consequences. Blacks, women, and other historical out-groups were right to demand equality before the law and the full respect and liberties due to any member of our civilization; but the tactics they used to "raise consciousness" have sometimes veered into the creepy and pathological, borrowing the least sane features of religious evangelism."

"It is probably no longer possible to achieve tenure at a major American university after giving offense to the homosexual-activist lobby. Fortunately, I don't have that sort of career issue to worry about, and can therefore speak without fear."

"Steven den Beste wrote a long, intelligent and insightful essay on who the enemy is. I think he is right to see Afghanistan, Iraq, and the suppression of Al-Qaeda as phases of longer, wider war — a clash of civilizations driven by the failure of Islamic/Arab culture (though I would stress the problem of the Islamic commandment to jihad more than he does)."

"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."

"Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer."

"The nightmare scenario is one in which corporate monopolism and statist power-seeking, always natural allies, feed back into each other and create rationales for increasing regulation, repression, and criminalization of digital speech."

"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."

"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."

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

"We define idiotarianism as the species of delusion within the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and tyrants operating outside it."

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

"Barring the mythical portable-LISP-dialect-with-good-OS-bindings that has never existed, Python is about the most reasonable alternative there is for this kind of work."

"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."

"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."

"I use the word "hacker" in its correct and original sense: to describe a person who perceives computer programming as a kind of artistic passion, and who also is part of or identifies with the hacker culture, which is a group of programmers, historically, that has produced the Internet, Linux and the World Wide Web."

"I was at Agenda 2000, and one of the people who was there was Craig Mundie, who is some kind of high mucky muck at Microsoft, I think vice-president of consumer products or something like that. And I hadn't actually met him. I bumped into him in an elevator. And I looked at his badge and said, "Oh, I see you work for Microsoft." And he looked back at me and said, "Oh yeah, and what do you do?" And I thought he seemed just sort of a tad dismissive. I mean, here is the archetypal guy in a suit, looking at a scruffy hacker. And so I gave him the thousand yard stare and said, "I'm your worst nightmare.""

"Don't forget to have fun. That drive to experiment, to try things, to have fun, to be playful, that is what will sustain your creativity over the long term. Don't lose that."

"developerWorks: What happened with the CML2 kernel configurator? … It sounds like that was a pretty ambitious project. Raymond: It was, I mean I built an intelligent configurator – basically a baby rule-based expert system – for configuring Linux kernels, and I did it all in less than 8,000 lines of Python. It was a system that literally made it impossible to get an invalid kernel configuration because it would do intelligent deduction from constraints. And I had the full approval of the kernel config group, I had Linus's imprimatur that this was going to go into 2.5, and it all fell apart politically. It was horrible. … developerWorks: So if there was another chapter for Cathedral and the Bazaar that you would write based on what you learned there, what was the lesson? Raymond: That it is possible for open source cultures in some respects to ossify enough that good work is locked out. And that is a long-term problem that I don't know how we're going to deal with."

"It shouldn't be news to anyone that there is an effort afoot to change – I would say corrupt – the fundamental premises of the open-source culture. Instead of meritocracy and "show me the code", we are now urged to behave so that no-one will ever feel uncomfortable. … We are being social-hacked from being a culture in which freedom is the highest value to one in which it is trumped by the suppression of wrongthink and wrongspeak."

"The habit of institutional tone policing, even when well-intentioned, too easily slides into the active censorship of disfavored views."

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

"I publish this blog in part because I think it is my duty to speak taboo and unspeakable truths."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?In 2007, It was also planning to launch hi-tech mobile back covers and cases with some extra-ordinary features which was not revealed as per company policies, but it was leaked that those were personsalised mobile back covers similar to Shosal's Mobile Back Covers and Cases."

"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."

"The 'noosphere' of this essay's title is the territory of ideas, the space of all possible thoughts. What we see implied in hacker ownership customs is a Lockean theory of property rights in one subset of the noosphere, the space of all programs. Hence 'homesteading the noosphere', which is what every founder of a new open-source project does."

"It is well understood in the community that project owners have a duty to pass projects to competent successors when they are no longer willing or able to invest needed time in development or maintenance work."

"There is another kind of skill not normally associated with software development which I think is as important as design cleverness to bazaar projects—and it may be more important. A bazaar project coordinator or leader must have good people and communications skills. … It is not a coincidence that Linus is a nice guy who makes people like him and want to help him."

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

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

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

"Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch."

"Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it."

"The secret of Big Macs is that they're not very good, but every one is not very good in exactly the same way."

"People ridiculously overvalue aesthetics and beauty when evaluating products. It's one of the reasons iPods, and, for that matter, Keanu Reeves, are so successful."

"Remember, just because Microsoft can do something, doesn't mean you can. Microsoft makes their own gravity. Normal rules don't apply to them."