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1. Beware the enthusiastic newcomer who wants to redo everything The Right Way.

2. Don't make standards so stupid that no one can follow them and be sane.

3. Make a scratch directory for small throw-away tests. Use it often.

4. Avoid auto-doc systems that require elaborate comment formatting.

5. Never allow failure to look like success.

6. Make everything easily testable.

7. Make as much as possible configurable, and make all configurations automatable.

8. Know what your compiler does to your code; if it will make your code clearer and easier to change, do it yourself.

9. Substitution is the key to modularity.

10. Study theory, and practice; theory gives meaning to practice, and practice gives reality to theory.

11. A bit of wisdom always sounds more profound when formatted as a chiasma, and a chiasma always sounds more profound with a bit of wisdom.

12. Never stop at 10.



Interesting - what's your objection to auto-doc systems (4)? I assume you mean things like javadocs and python docstrings, which I make use of a lot and people I code with find helpful, too.


My objection is not to auto-doc systems in general. Note the restrictive clause after the noun.




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