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- The following advice is borrowed from Communications of the ACM, September
- 1985, Programming Pearls, page 896-899. Individual credits are omitted in the
- interests of brevity, and can be found in the source.
-
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- Debug only code - comments can lie.
-
- If you have too many special cases, you are doing it wrong.
-
- Get your data structures correct first, and the rest of the program will write
- itself.
-
- Testing can show the presence of bugs, but not their absence.
-
- The first step in fixing a broken program is getting it to fail repeatedly.
-
- The fastest algorithm can frequently be replaced by one that is almost as fast
- and much easier to understand.
-
- The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components of a computer system are
- those that aren't there.
-
- Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
-
- Don't use the computer to do things that can be done efficiently by hand.
-
- [Thompson's Rule for first-time telescope makers] It is faster to make a
- four-inch mirror then a six-inch mirror than to make a six-inch mirror.
-
- If you lie to the computer, it will get you.
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- Inside of every large program is a small program struggling to get out.
-