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Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)

cs.unc.edu

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Re: Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the actual quote is: "Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious." -- Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month (1975)

This is the biggest issue I see with AI driven development. The data structures are incredibly naive. Yes it's easy to steer them in a different direction but that comes at a long term cost. The further you move from naive the more often you will need to resteer downstream and no amount of context management will help you, it is fighting against the literal mean.

Naive doesn't mean bad. 99% of software can be written with understood, well documented data structures. One of the problems with ai is that it allows people to create software without understanding the trade offs of certain data structures, algorithms and more fundamental hardware management strategies.

You don't need to be able to pass a leet code interview, but you should know about big O complexity, you should be able to work out if a linked list is better than an array, you should be able to program a trie, and you should be at least aware of concepts like cache coherence / locality. You don't need to be an expert, but these are realities of the way software and hardware work. They're also not super complex to gain a working knowledge of, and various LLMs are probably a really good way to gain that knowledge.

Re: Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)

#34

I feel like 1 and 2 are only applicable in cases of novelty. The thing is, if you build enough of the same kinds of systems in the same kinds of domains, you can kinda tell where you should optimize ahead of time. Most of us tend to build the same kinds of systems and usually spend a career or a good chunk of our careers in a given domain. I feel like you can't really be considered a staff/principal if you can't alre…

Rob Pike wrote Unix and Golang, but sure, you’re built different.

> Rob Pike wrote Unix

Unix was created by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs (AT&T) in 1969. Thompson wrote the initial version, and Ritchie later contributed significantly, including developing the C programming language, which Unix was subsequently rewritten in.

Re: Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)

#39
post #5

"Epigrams in Programming" by Alan J. Perlis has a lot more, if you like short snippets of wisdom :) https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html > Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming. Always preferred Perlis' version, that might be slightly o…

Perlis is just wrong in that way academics so often are. Pike is right.

Hang on, they mostly agree with each other. I've spoken to Rob Pike a few times and I never heard him call out Perlis as being wrong. On this particular point, Perlis and Pike are both extending an existing idea put forward by Fred Brooks.

Re: Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)

#40
post #35

Rule 5 is definitely king. Code acts on data, if the data is crap, you're already lost. edit: s/data/data structure/

… if the data structures are crap. Good software can handle crap data.

That is not what I meant. I meant crap data structures. Sorry it's late here.
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