Skip to content

It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".

— Richard Stallman On Hacking (2002)

Another quote →

More quotes by Richard Stallman

C++ is a badly designed and ugly language. It would be a shame to use it in Emacs.

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control.

The hard part of programming is the same regardless of the language.

Odious ideas are not entitled to hide from criticism behind the human shield of their believers' feelings.

The Adobe flash plug-in is non-free software, and people should not install it, or suggest installing it, or even tell people it exists.

All Richard Stallman quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Richard Stallman (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.