3 Golden Rules

"Just as I cannot step in the same river twice,  the person who created this bug and I are two separate beings in the fabric of the universe. Therefore, I will also not be the one who fixes it."

         Heraclitus of Ephesus, a programmer

I don't like code manifests.

Rina Artstain once tweeted that we only think we know certain things about parenting because as luck would have it, we haven't had a child to whom all of them don't apply.
That's how I feel about code manifests.

However, I do have a manifest of my own, short though it may be, so I want to frame it differently. What follows are not the three rules I think everyone should follow to get a "cleaner" code or some other metric of goodness. Rather, these are three things I like when I see in other people's code and annoy me when I see blatantly disregarded. 

Here we go.

1.

"לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמוֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה."

פרקי אבות, ב' טז'

"It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task, but neither are you free to absolve yourself from it."

Pirkei Avot 2:16

This is one of the greatest quotes I know and it sounds so much better in Hebrew.

2.

"Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity."

William of Ockham

Yes, this is the OG Ockham's razor. How amazing it is that a Franciscan friar who lived 700 years ago foresaw the harms of overusing OOP and polymorphism.

3.

"Writing good code is superior to writing bad code.
Deleting code is superior to writing good code.
Superior to all is concluding that some code does not have to be written at all."

Confucius

Well, not Confucius, but if one wants people to listen, one should attribute their thoughts to someone famous, preferably dead.

I'm pretty sure Oscar Wilde said that one.