rob pike.

yep the best crashout of the year guy

Illustration

(valid crashout btw).

he on his free time coauthored go and did a bunch of other cool things like utf-8 and plan 9 but today i want to point out his rules of programming i had heard about them a few months ago. the first four rules are about yagni and kiss and the importance of measuring before you take any optimization decisions but the one i love more here and wanted to talk about is the fifth:

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.

it’s actually not even a completely new idea it’s straight out of the mythical man month where fred brooks said "show me your tables and i won't usually need your flowcharts; they'll be obvious."

i overheard about data oriented programming (dop) in a meetup once and that confused me at first because i thought this rule was about dop but it’s not. dop is usually about making the cpu happy whereas pike’s rule is about clarity (making the human happy). he's telling you that data structures are the ground truth of your system and the code is just the glue. if your logic is complicated it’s usually because your data structure sucks. fix the structure and the code simplifies itself.