Eric S. Raymond
Eric S. Raymond was born on December 4, 1957, in Boston, a city whose position within American intellectual and technological life provides a fitting backdrop for a figure who would become closely associated with computing culture. A citizen of the United States, Raymond was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, and his working identity spans an unusually wide range of disciplines — programmer, hacker, computer scientist, journalist, anthropologist, and writer, all terms that attach to him with equal claim.
Within technical communities, Raymond is identified as both a programmer and a hacker, the second of those words carrying, in the subcultures he has inhabited, a sense of craft and inquisitive engagement with systems. Fetchmail is among his notable works, a project that sits alongside his writing as evidence of a career conducted simultaneously in code and in prose. That combination of practical and discursive work defines much of how Raymond has engaged with the field.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar is the work most directly associated with his name. The essay presents two contrasting models of how software development can be organized, and its reach extended well beyond the circles of those who write code professionally. Raymond, drawing on the multiple vocational identities he carries — including the observational habits of the journalist and the anthropologist — brought to that text a perspective that moved between technical analysis and cultural description. He writes in English, and the essay's audience was correspondingly broad.
Raymond is frequently referred to by the initialism ESR, a compression that functions within hacker culture as a mark of familiarity and standing. The shorthand points to the communities in which his work has circulated and in which his various roles — as programmer, writer, and analyst of computing culture — have found their context. He was born in Boston, and it is from within the broader American intellectual and technological landscape that his career, and the works associated with it, have taken shape.
Quotes by Eric S. Raymond
Eric S. Raymond's insights on:
Being able to break security doesn’t make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.
Anyway, in a world of cheap PCs and fast Internet links, we find pretty consistently that the only really limiting resource is skilled attention.
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.
There is a flip side to this. In the Unix world, libraries which are delivered as libraries should come with exerciser programs.
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.
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.
Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.
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.
