Rob Pike's Five Essential Rules for Effective Programming
By
vismit2000
Good intentions, undercooked execution. The bake is missing.
Summary
The article presents Rob Pike's five rules of programming, which emphasize practical software development principles. The rules focus on avoiding premature optimization, measuring performance before tuning, using simple algorithms for typical cases, and understanding that simplicity often outperforms complexity. The rules are distilled from decades of programming experience and echo Tony Hoare's famous maxim about premature optimization being the root of all evil.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledYou can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is.
Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.
Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
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