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Jamie Zawinski Quotes

born 1968 United States

Jamie Zawinski (JWZ; born November 3, 1968) is a computer programmer known for significant contributions to the free software projects Mozilla and XEmacs, and early versions of the Netscape Navigator web browser.

United States
Programmers

Also known as: Zawinski, Jamie

Random Jamie Zawinski quote

25 quotes

Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

Zawinski's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.

The real bug here is that the design of the system even permits this class of bug. It is unconscionable that someone designing a critical piece of security infrastructure would design the system in such a way that it does not fail safe.

Today, I use Linux as my primary OS (on an x86 PC, and on a Thinkpad), and I also use Irix (on an SGI O2). Linux has improved a great deal since I wrote this, specifically with respect to its ease of installation.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Jamie Zawinski (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.