42 Jamie Zawinski Quotes

Jamie Zawinski quotes

1. Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems. [1][2]

2. You can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of 'open source,' and have everything magically work out. [3]

3. Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes. [4]

4. I'd just like to take this moment to point out that C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string. ([5] commands.c:501)

5. Linux is only free if your time has no value. [6] - in an interview in June 1998; he later claimed that 'Bits and pieces of this article have been quoted out of context in lots of places'

6. 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. [7] in a comment on his site in 2000

7. Your 'use case' should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?[8]

8. My one purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others. [9]

9. If you're using Windows, go fuck yourself. [10]

10. I've noticed that when I get quoted in .sig files, it's never any of the actual *clever* things I say all the time. Usually it's something dumb. [11]

11. Don't do drugs, kids. Stay in school. [12]

12. Browser compatibility problems are nature's way of saying 'stop trying to be so fuckin' clever'. [13]

13. C (it's not just a language, it's a grade) [14]

14. 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. [15]

1. I don't get much sense of reward from having discovered how to get the Foo card to coexist with the Bar card.

2. I dont get much sense of reward from having discovered how to get the Foo card to coexist with the Bar card.

3. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.

4. I find that getting something on the screen as soon as possible really helps focus the problem for me. It helps me decide what to work on next. Because if you're just looking at that big to-do list it's like, eh, I don't know which one I should do—does it matter which one I do? But if there's something you can actually look at, even if it's just the debug output of your mailbox parser, it's like, OK, there!

5. Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla [Netscape 1.0] is not big because it's full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. But being a shining jewel of perfection was not a goal when we wrote Mozilla.

6. The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don't push it.

7. Any time someone says "that's it, I'm leaving" I ask them whether they'd prefer to live under US domestic policy, or US foreign policy. As bad as things get inside an empire, they're usually worse in the protectorates.

8. Why should someone have to retrain themselves to use a new application that does the same basic thing as the old application, just because something as trivial as the operating system changed out from under them?

9. Mostly I use the O2 as an X terminal, however, running my apps on Linux and displaying remotely.

10. Your needs are big because the Internet is big.

11. If you give a cracker a new toy, the first thing he'll do is carve his initials in it. Fortunately, most crackers get over that once they're through puberty.

12. Because, you see, what I want to do is to commoditize the OS. I want to have access to all the applications that I need to do the things that I need to do, regardless.

13. I eat and drink at my desk, but I'm a tidy eater.

14. Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

15. To a database person, every nail looks like a thumb. Or something like that.

16. I think Linux is a great thing, because Linux is an alternative to Windows, and because, of all the operating systems that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot.

17. You can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company.

18. I use a really simple calendar program on my computer.

19. Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS, and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!

20. I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more.

21. You can always affect things - so can you change it in a way that will make you as happy with it in the future as you were in the past? Maybe it won't be the same, but it might be something else you also like.

22. [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.

23. On the other hand, there would be some value in different folks getting together to share expertise and technology; but to the listener, it wouldn't necessarily seem like a single station in the traditional sense.

24. If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

25. If you give a hacker a new toy, the first thing he'll do is take it apart to figure out how it works.

26. 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.

27. Nothing stands still. The real question is can you change it?

28. These people also tended to pretend to care deeply about the blind and otherwise disabled. I am sympathetic to the needs of those users, but I can't help but think that those who claimed to speak for the blind were being more than a little disingenuous, just like those Hemp people who present their arguments in terms of their deep and abiding care for the textile industry, when their real motives are ... something else entirely.