MJD's Good Advice and Maxims for Programmers

  From: m...@plover.com (Mark Jason Dominus)
  Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl.misc
  Subject: Good Advice and Maxims for Programmers
  Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2002 05:14:05 +0000 (UTC)
  Organization: Plover Systems Co.
  Lines: 107
  Message-ID: <a6ukat$a4b$1@plover.com>

  [mailed and posted]

  Back in October of 2000, I posted an article here in which I said:

  >I consulted my File of Good Advice on this one, and it said:
  >
  >#11907 Looking for a compiler bug is the strategy of LAST resort.  LAST resort.
  >
  >(No, I didn't just make this up; I really do have such a file and it
  >really does say that.)

  Peter Scott asked:
  >Can we see the other entries?

  And I replied:
  >I've been including them in my article headers for a while now.

  Sometime afterwards, I stopped including random good advice in my
  article headers, because some of it is rather abrasive, and I didn't
  want people to take it the wrong way.

  So here at last is my file of Good Advice.  Caution: This file
  contains an unusually high incidence of naughty words.  Stop reading
  now if you are offended by any of the words 'fuck', 'fucking', 'crap',
  'shit', or 'asshole'.  Oops, sorry.

  #11900 You cannot just paste code with no understanding of what is going on and expect it to work.
  #11901 You can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, Retardo!
  #11902 You said it didn't work, but you didn't say what it would have done if it *had* worked.
  #11903 What are you really trying to accomplish here?
  #11904 Who the fuck cares which one is faster?
  #11905 Now is the time in our program where you look at the manual.
  #11906 Look at the error message!  Look at the error message!
  #11907 Looking for a compiler bug is the strategy of LAST resort.  LAST resort.
  #11908 Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
  #11909 Bad programmer!  No cookie!
  #11910 I see you omitted $! from the error message.   It won't tell you what went wrong if you don't ask it to.
  #11911 You wrote the same thing twice here.  The cardinal rule of programming is that you never ever write the same thing twice.
  #11912 Evidently it's important to you to get the wrong answer as quickly as possible.
  #11913 Gee, I don't know.  I wonder what the manual says about that?
  #11914 Well, no duh.  That's because you ignored the error message, dimwit.
  #11915 Only Sherlock Holmes can debug the program by pure deduction from the output.  You are not Sherlock Holmes.  Run the fucking debugger already.
  #11916 Always ignore the second error message unless the meaning is obvious.
  #11917 Read.  Learn.  Evolve.
  #11918 Well, then get one that *does* do auto-indent.  You can't do good work with bad tools.
  #11919 No.  You must believe the ERROR MESSAGE.  You MUST believe the error message.
  #11920 The error message is the Truth.  The error message is God.  
  #11921 It could be anything.  Too bad you didn't bother to diagnose the error, huh?
  #11922 You don't suppress error messages, you dumbass, you PAY ATTENTION and try to understand them.
  #11923 Never catch a signal except as a last resort.
  #11924 Well, if you don't know what it does, why did you put it in your program?
  #11925 Gosh, that wasn't very bright, was it?
  #11926 That's like taking a crap on someone's doorstep and then ringing the doorbell to ask for toilet paper.
  #11927 A good approach to that problem would be to hire a computer programmer.
  #11928 First get a book on programming.  Then read it.  Then write the program.
  #11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?'  Then have the computer do it the same way.
  #11930 Would you like to see my rate card?
  #11931 I think you are asking the wrong question here.
  #11932 Holy cow.
  #11933 Because it's a syntax error.
  #11934 Because this is Perl, not C.
  #11935 Because this is Perl, not Lisp.
  #11936 Because that's the way it is.
  #11937 Because.
  #11938 If you have `some weird error', the problem is probably with your frobnitzer.
  #11939 Because the computer cannot read your mind.  Guess what?  I cannot read your mind *either*.
  #11940 You said `It doesn't work'.  The next violation will be punished by death.
  #11941 Of course it doesn't work!  That's because you don't know what you are doing!
  #11942 Sure, but you have to have some understanding also.
  #11943 Ah yes, and you are the first person to have noticed this bug since 1987.  Sure.
  #11944 Yes, that's what it's supposed to do when you say that.
  #11945 Well, what did you expect?
  #11946 Perhaps you have forgotten that this is an engineering discipline, not some sort of black magic.
  #11947 You know, this sort of thing is amenable to experimental observation.
  #11948 Perhaps your veeblefitzer is clogged.
  #11949 What happens when you try?
  #11950 Now you are just being superstitious.  
  #11951 Your question has exceeded the system limit for pronouns in a single sentence.  Please dereference and try again.
  #11952 In my experience that is a bad strategy, because the people who ask such questions are the ones who paste the answer into their program without understanding it and then complain that it `does not work'.
  #11953 Of course, this is a heuristic, which is a fancy way of saying that it doesn't work. 
  #11954 If your function is written correctly, it will handle an empty array the same way as a nonempty array.
  #11955 When in doubt, use brute force.
  #11956 Well, it might be more intuitive that way, but it would also be useless.
  #11957 Show the code.
  #11958 The bug is in you, not in Perl.
  #11959 Cargo-cult.
  #11960 So you threw in some random punctuation for no particular reason, and then you didn't get the result you expected.  Hmmmm.
  #11961 How should I know what is wrong when I haven't even seen the code?  I am not clairvoyant.
  #11962 How should I know how to do what you want when you didn't say what you wanted to do?
  #11963 It's easy to get the *wrong* answer in O(1) time.
  #11964 I guess this just goes to show that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink it.
  #11999 You are a stupid asshole.  Shut the fuck up.

  Maybe sometime later I will post annotations for the more cryptic ones
  explaining their intended application.  For example, it may not be
  obvious that you use #11943 when a person appears in the newsgroup
  with the complaint that the Perl 'if' statement does not work.

  -- 
  Mark Jason Dominus                                         m...@plover.com