Wer größere Sachen schreibt, sollte diese Regeln kennen:
Whenever possible, steal code
Brooke’s law: Plan to throw one away, you will anyhow
If you lie to a computer, it will get you
Make it work first before you make it work fast
If you have too many special cases, you are doing it wrong
Get your data structures [classes] right first, and the rest of the program will write itself
When in doubt, use brute force
Wenn du es nicht auf Deutsch sagen kannst, kannst du es auch nicht programmieren
nach: Bentley, J. (1988), More Programming Pearls, Addison-Wesley
Noch ein paar mehr Zitate von Größen, die ich bemerkenswert finde:
If it doesn’t solve some fairly immediate need, it’s almost certainly over-designed. – Linus Torvalds (2004)
Projects promoting programming in “natural language” are intrinsically doomed to fail. – Edsger Dijkstra (1975)
Computer science still seems to be looking for the magic bullet that will cause people to write correct programs without having to think. Instead, we need to teach people how to think – Larry Wall (1999)
Indeed, pleasure has probably the main goal all along. But I hesitate to admit it, because computer scientists want to maintain their image as hard-working individuals who deserve high salaries. – Don Knuth
Rule: “You shouldn’t have to open up a black box and take it apart to find out you’ve been pushing the wrong buttons!” Corollary: “Every black box should have at least TWO blinking lights: Paper Jam and Service Required (or equivalent).” – Steven Majewski
You need to realize that your system is just going to be a module in some bigger system to come, and so you have to be part of something else, and it’s a bit of a way of life. – Tim Berners-Lee
You write a great program, regardless of language, by redoing it over & over & over & over, until your fingers bleed and your soul is drained. But if you tell newbies that, they might decide to go off and do something sensible, like bomb defusing – Tim Peters
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. – Brian Kernighan
If you can’t do a first version in six months with a team of six people it is a sign that you don’t really know what you want. – Jack Diederich (2006)
But it could all be Quatsch, Quatsch mit Soße – Robert Weinberg (2006)
It’s hard to make a mistake by having too many short and simple functions. And much too easy to make them when you have too few – Thomas Bartkus (2006)
Manche dieser Regeln kennen wir schon aus Python, andere sind dort nicht nötig, weil sie sich von selbst ergeben. So oder ähnlich möchte man das aber in jeder Programmiersprache haben, ob nun Maschinensprache oder Prolog.