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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.

— Eric S. Raymond

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More quotes by Eric S. Raymond

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

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1997)

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.

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

The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1997)

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

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