The "Principled Programming" Project

Recently I have been reading through the developer.* site and came across The "Principled Programming" Project. Though not directly related to Perl, the assorted essays are well written and pertain the the general art of programming. These are not necessarily new ideas -- many are familiar topics. If you have not seen them before, perhaps you will find them of interest in your quest to master your programming skills, Perl or otherwise.

The topics of the essays are as follows:

• Principle #1: The Principle of Personal Character
• Principle #2: The Principle of Aesthetics
• Principle #3: The Principle of Clarity
• Principle #4:The Principle of Layout
• Principle #5: The Principle of Explicitness
• Principle #6: The Principle of Self-Documenting Code
• Principle #7: The Principle of Comments
• Principle #8: The Principle of Assumptions
• Principle #9: The Principle of User Interaction
• Principle #10: The Principle of Going Back
• Principle #11: The Principle of Other People's Time and Money

Enjoy,
Matt

[Aristotle]

And on one single page for the Truly Lazy or a printer: http://www.developerdotstar.com/pp-printable.htm

Makeshifts last the longest.

[SysApe9000]

In some ways Principle #5 goes against Perl's grain, or at least it seems that way to me. Taking advantage of all of Perl's logical (implicit) defaults is what makes the code I write in Perl so small.

These are great suggestions though, and probably even #5 is well worth applying even in Perl.

[diotalevi]

This is probably one of those "all things in moderation" areas. In general I try not to specify defaults because they distract from the truely interesting unique components. So I'd probably look at a default-ful chunk of code and have to pick through those to find the non-defaults. It's more time, more work and generally harder to work with default-ful code. Or that's true (for some value of true) for me anyway.

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