These are instructive to look at now. Important to recall the '1989' date of course, but with hindsight... I love Rule 5 ("choose the right data structures and

These are instructive to look at now. Important to recall the '1989' date of course, but with hindsight... I love Rule 5 ("choose the right data structures and the algorithms will almost always be self-evident"), especially when combined with STL and strong typing. There is a degree of irony in taking this advice from Pike, given the design of Go. Much of the material on complexity assumes you are hand-coding things from scratch. I am happy to take on complexity (as long as I understand what I'm getting into) from well-designed libraries rather than building something "simple and robust" from scratch. The statement about binary trees vs splay trees is illustrative; unless I need to see the bare data structure again I would much rather take on something from the STL, complex or otherwise.