One man's GPL is another's DSL.

“Anything on the screen should be purely informative about my prior actions, "what you've typed", not "what you can type"”
— the semicolon, advocating CLI over GUI

1. Create a name set surrounding your idea.
2. Partition your idea to properties.
3. Group properties to intensions and essence.
4. Optionally separate one idea to a hierarchy of ideas.
5. Evaluate your name set.
6. Name each idea.
7. Formally describe ideas.

For every unformalized general problem there is a set of informal specific problems that if they become formalized, sufficiently lead to said generalization.

“By a small sample we may judge of the whole piece.”
— Miguel de Cervantes

~

“Using case-insensitive filenames and commands is an act of evil and the sinners must be punished with deprecation.”
— the semicolon

“I feel no need to cater to bad programmers.”
— Charles H. Moore, #Forth

“Chuck's greatest contribution was teaching that understanding and simplifying the problem was far more effective than adding complexity to a solution.”
— massung, GitHub comment

Test, even after the smallest of changes.

How to keep your code clean

• Modularize: break it down to pieces that make sense alone and may be reused elsewhere

• Have general conventions for naming files, modules, functions, variables, etc.

• Document everything: write comments, docstrings and function helplines

• Keep performance in mind: free files, resources and dynamic memory

• Abstain from repeated code: use procedures and functions instead

• Keep your code readable using indentation and alignment

• Keep global variables to a minimum by using singletons

• No surprises: handle exceptional cases

A worthy abstraction is one which is achieved through introducing little indirection.

What can't be automated?

It is recreational, to recreate in Recreate.

Following standards while fixing a bug prevents future bugs and a messy codebase.

“I don't think in any language. I think in images. I don't believe that people think in languages. They don't move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that’s about all. ”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (1973)

Pedantry is to make explicit that which is implicit.

Egyptian hieroglyph was the first monowidth font.

Resist the urge to marry the language to the environment.

Constantly ask how.

Mathematics is often an inappropriate approach for solutions, but almost always the one used.