Social experiment - single thoughts on programming that made an impact
9 comments
You can't make your program run faster, you can only make it do less.
Almost any problem can be solved by adding a level of indirection. Almost every program can be sped up by removing a level of indirection.
The hardest bugs are those where your mental model of the situation is just wrong, so you can't see the problem at all : B. Kernighan
The cheapest, fastest and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren't there. -- Gordon Bell
Someone reading/modifying a program is never as smart as the person who wrote it, even if they're the same person.
If you don't know the tradeoffs that you're making, how do you know that you're making the right ones?
Make it beautiful even if you are just hacking together a quick spike.
Make it run, make it right, make it fast. In that order.
All programming is an exercise in caching.
I'd like to create a collection of such things. I'm pretty sure things that affect you guys will be of varying value, but if we make a list and then let them float up and down as they get modded, maybe we'll get something interesting.
Replies are discouraged. These will not be universal truths, they will not be unarguable, but I suggest that this is not the place. Perhaps if you really disagree you can blog about it and submit a link. But perhaps not here - perhaps as a main item.
Worth a try? Who will play along? I'll start ...