4 ms·

Good advice, but I don't know if I would call it a best kept secret. Maybe I've just been reading all of the right books. Fred Brooks: "Show me your flow chart

Good advice, but I don't know if I would call it a best kept secret. Maybe I've just been reading all of the right books. Fred Brooks: "Show me your flow charts and conceal your tables and I shall continue to be mystified, show me your tables and I won't usually need your flow charts; they'll be obvious." Rob Pike: "Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming." Eric S. Raymond: "Fold knowledge into data, so program logic can be stupid and robust." Peter Norvig: "Use data-driven programming, where pattern/action pairs are stored in a table."

silentbicycle 18y ago
> Maybe I've just been reading all of the right books. The sad thing is, by reading books at all you're already way ahead. The flexibility data-driven programs have is why people say that "data is code" (the flipside of Lisp's "code is data"). Also, I found working with ML (OCaml, in my case) made thinking in terms of types and overall data-structure design much clearer. It's a major strength of the language, and spending some time with it will probably give you insights usable in most other languages. ML was designed by people who knew Lisp quite well, and felt that (for some problems - in their case, theorem proving) it would be greatly improved by having a better type system.