Join 📚 Josh Beckman's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Josh's read, .
Pike's rules 1 and 2 restate Tony Hoare's famous maxim "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
Ken Thompson rephrased Pike's rules 3 and 4 as "When in doubt, use brute force."
Rules 3 and 4 are instances of the design philosophy KISS.
Rule 5 was previously stated by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month and is often shortened to "write stupid code that uses smart objects".
Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming
University of Texas in Austin
If whatever I was doing on the kitchen counter is now called “software engineering,” then ordering food at a restaurant should be called “cooking.” As much as I marvel in this new and (dare I say) magical way of manifesting products and services from thin air, I question whether it is truly a creative process anymore. Inasmuch as we pursue craftsmanship as a goal unto itself, what’s the point for us humans when the machines are going to be better, faster, and cheaper than all of us?
The Giddy Nothingness of Automatic Creation
Ben Sigelman
Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: *Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.* By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach — what he calls nutritionism — and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part.
In Defense of Food
Michael Pollan
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