perlmeditation salva These are mine: <ol> <li>Keep things simple. <li>Layering/encapsulation and good API design are the keys to good programming. <li>Too much abstraction is as bad as too little. <li>Minimize code dependencies and specially temporal dependencies: I specially hate the case when you have an object that requires its methods to be called in a particular order and that is manipulated from different layers. Impossible to follow code! <li>If you have to write some complicated piece of code, try to hide it behind and easy to use API. <li>Code flow must be easy to follow. <li>Perl is a powerful and expressive language, don't be afraid to use it to its maximum. <li>Avoid code duplication. Don't copy&paste. Boilerplate is OK to a certain degree. <li>Make your subs/methods meaningful. <li>Try to avoid helper subs/methods with long lists of arguments. <li>Don't use an object when a simple hash or array will do. <li>Speed matters, scalability matters, memory usage matters, IO matters. Keep that in your mind while programming. <li>When breaking some of the previous rules, document it. <li>Check the validity of your input (specially when dealing with external input), refuse anything you don't know how to handle: Note that this does not go against the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle|robutness principle], they are orthogonal concepts. <li>Write regular expressions as strict as possible. <li>Check for errors extensively. Don't ignore them. <li>Include internal consistence checks. <li>Add lots of debugging code so that you may be able to debug problems reported by others even when you are not able to reproduce them. <li>Depending on an external module needs a good justification. <li>use strict, use warnings, selectively disable them when required. <li>No TDD, it gets on the way of my iterative design/programming thinking process (but if it works for you I am OK with it). <li>Otherwise, testing is a very good thing. <li>Be consistent in your coding style. <li>And use a good editor that takes care of it for you: actually I don't care too much about cosmetics, as far as blocks are indented it is OK for me. <li>Finally, paraphrasing the great Salvor Hardin, "Never let your sense of best practices prevent you from doing what is right!" </ol>