Programmers From The United States

"Google never did any advertising. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves."

"There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student."

"At any given time, there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work, and if you aren't one of them, you won't just have fewer great hackers, you'll have zero."

"I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up."

"When those far removed from the creation of wealth -- undergraduates, reporters, politicians -- hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software."

"The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want."

"A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of."

"As a rule of thumb, the more qualifiers there are before the name of a country, the more corrupt the rulers. A country called The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably the last place in the world you'd want to live."

"If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one."

"At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't."

"Software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. If you can't design software as well as implement it, don't start a startup."

"The best thing software can be is easy, but the way to do this is to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices."

"Architects know that some kinds of design problems are more personal than others. One of the cleanest, most abstract design problems is designing bridges. There your job is largely a matter of spanning a given distance with the least material. The other end of the spectrum is designing chairs. Chair designers have to spend their time thinking about human butts."

"A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points."

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

"Object-oriented [programming] never made it outside of Xerox PARC; only the term did."

"The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."

"Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)"

"However, I am no big fan of Smalltalk either, even though it compares very favourably with most programming systems today (I don't like any of them, and I don't think any of them are suitable for the real programming problems of today, whether for systems or for end-users)."

"The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully."

"I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher."

"[ Computing ] is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around."

"Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There's an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.” Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we're in — the one that we think is reality."

"I fear —as far as I can tell— that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training. I've heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification."

"If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It's just secret to this pop culture."

"Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out."

"Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture."

"Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful. But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever."

"Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. Basically, a lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn't think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted. There should be a half-life on software so old software just melts away over 10 or 15 years."

"Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves."

"I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!”"

"... greatest single programming language ever designed. (About the Lisp programming language.)"

"Actually I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."

"I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras."

"The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to."

"Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born."

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

"...when I do this, some people think that it's because I want my ego to be fed, right? Of course, I'm not saying — I'm not asking you to call it "Stallmanix," right?"

"According to Sam Williams in "Free as in Freedom-Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Richard Stallman was thoughting in 1993 that "System V, ... was the inferior version of Unix""

"According to RMS, the DRM isn't about rights; it's about theft, theft of our freedoms. RMS then took the rest of his time to poke fun at the image that some people have about his attitude of being "holier than thou." After dressing himself in an outfit appropriate for a holy figure, RMS pronounced himself "Saint iGNUcius of the Church of Emacs" and provided a prayer to bless one's computer. One should "exorcise evil proprietary operating systems" doing so would put one on the road to sainthood."

"In our original interview, Stallman said, “I’m the last survivor of a dead culture. And I don’t really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead.” Now, meeting over Chinese food, he reaffirms this. “I have certainly wished I had killed myself when I was born,” he says. “In terms of effect on the world, it’s very good that I’ve lived. And so I guess, if I could go back in time and prevent my birth, I wouldn’t do it. But I sure wish I hadn’t had so much pain.”"

"I first met Richard Stallman, a denizen of MIT's AI Lab, in 1983. Even then he was bemoaning the sad decline of hacker culture and felt that the commercialization of software was a crime. When I spoke to him that year, as the computer industry was soaring, he looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t believe that software can be owned.” I called him “the last of the true hackers” and assumed the world would soon squash him. Was I ever wrong. Stallman's crusade for free software has continued to inform the ongoing struggles over intellectual property and won him a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” He founded the Free Software Foundation and wrote the GNU operating system, which garnered widespread adoption after Linus Torvalds wrote Linux to run with it; the combination is used in millions of devices. More important, perhaps, is that Stallman provided the intellectual framework that led to the open source movement, a critical element of modern software and the Internet itself. If the software world had saints, Stallman would have been beatified long ago."

"Every generation has its philosopher — a writer or an artist who captures the imagination of a time. Sometimes these philosophers are recognized as such; often it takes generations before the connection is made real. But recognized or not, a time gets marked by the people who speak its ideals, whether in the whisper of a poem, or the blast of a political movement. Our generation has a philosopher. He is not an artist, or a professional writer. He is a programmer. Richard Stallman began his work in the labs of MIT, as a programmer and architect building operating system software. He has built his career on a stage of public life, as a programmer and an architect founding a movement for freedom in a world increasingly defined by “code.” ... I don't know Stallman well. I know him well enough to know he is a hard man to like. He is driven, often impatient. His anger can flare at friend as easily as foe. He is uncompromising and persistent; patient in both. Yet when our world finally comes to understand the power and danger of code — when it finally sees that code, like laws, or like government, must be transparent to be free — then we will look back at this uncompromising and persistent programmer and recognize the vision he has fought to make real: the vision of a world where freedom and knowledge survives the compiler. And we will come to see that no man, through his deeds or words, has done as much to make possible the freedom that this next society could have. We have not earned that freedom yet. We may well fail in securing it. But whether we succeed or fail, in these essays is a picture of what that freedom could be. And in the life that produced these words and works, there is inspiration for anyone who would, like Stallman, fight to create this freedom."

"... totalitarian rulers, established parallel structures to work their will, bypassing rule-bound state structures that were less ready to follow shocking orders ..."

"If I'm the father of Open Source, it was conceived through artificial insemination using stolen sperm without my knowledge or consent."

"You and I we exist for ourselves, fundamentally. We should care about others but each human being is a source of value, each human being deserves things. And so if you lose control over your computing, that's bad for you, directly bad for you. So my first reaction is to say: Oh, what a shame; I hope you recover the control over your computing and the way you do that is to stop using the non-free software."

"Friend don't let companies spy on friends."

"Any time I connect to a website other than Wikipedia, it's through Tor."

"Using GPL is encroaching on our rights to encroach on yours."

"I have to explain that I'm not an anarchist – I have a pro-state gland."