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Jamie Zawinski

American programmer

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.

Attributed

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

Quotes

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

  • 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.
    • "[1]" (About Ubuntu Bug)
  • 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?
  • I dug in a bit but then the smell of gasoline and burning flesh drove me away.
  • 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.
  • But instead I'm stuck inside under fluorescent lights, pushing bits around inside a computer in ways that are only interesting to other nerds.

Quotes about Zawinski

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