The Good Ole Occam
sat11mar2006—10w070d19%—04h27m00s—0utc
If you see hoof prints, think horses — not zebras.
The Pragmatic Programmer, p96, David Thomas and Andrew Hunt.
Now, is this the most shockingly beautiful, original phrasing of Occam’s Razor you’ve ever read or what?
2 Comments
It certainly is.
Sometime I’m going to re-read that book, but this time take notes. There are a lot of gems in there.Yup, I’m just over the middle of it but it has been most interesting. I like how they approach programming as a craft to be mastered; the carpenter metaphor is imbued implicitly and explicitly all over the book. So far, they’ve convinced me of the importance of having a versioning system, the value of plain text and of tracer bullets (and its difference with prototyping), the convenience of having the one editor to rule them all, and lots of other simple, valuable things. I loved the “Broken Windows” tip, the “DRY” one, and the one on orthogonality. In fact, that section—the one on the evils of duplication, orthogonality, and reversibility—was particularly subtle, yet deep: it makes it seem obvious that the key issue of programming as a craft is to keep things malleable.
What did you liked most of the book?