Jamie Zawinski

      Jamie Zawinski (JWZ; born c. 1968 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) 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.

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      Attributed

      • Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.
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      Sourced

      Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment (also known as Zawinski's Law) relates the pressure of popularity to the phenomenon of software bloat:

      • You can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of "open source," and have everything magically work out.
      • Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.
      • 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.
      • Linux is only free if your time has no value.
        • 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"
      • 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.
      • Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
      • My one purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.
      • If you're using Windows, go fuck yourself.
      • Don't do drugs, kids. Stay in school.
      • 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.
      • Browser compatibility problems are nature's way of saying "stop trying to be so fuckin' clever".
      • 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.
      • [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.
      • Your needs are big because the Internet is big.
      • 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.
      • There is a lot of money to be made in the business of secrets, of course.
      • Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.
      • 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.
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      Quotes about Zawinski

      • "One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub."
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      External links

      Wikipedia
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      Last modified on 22 May 2013, at 16:40