Rob Pike’s 5 Rules of Programming

1 · Kiko Beats · May 25, 2021, midnight
Rule 1. You can’t tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don’t try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you’ve proven that’s where the bottleneck is. Rule 2. Measure. Don’t tune for speed until you’ve measured, and even then don’t unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Tony Hoare Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have ...