id: 1154,1B
title: Rules of the UNIX Philosophy, continued.
date: 2024-03-24

Rules of the UNIX Philosophy, continued.

Continuing from the first 10:rR9

  1. Rule of silence: Only output if there’s something surprising to note.
  2. Rule of repair: Fail as early as possible, loudly.
  3. Rule of economy: Programmer time is more expensive than compute.
  4. Rule of generation: Write code that writes code where possible.
  5. Rule of optimization: Make it work before improving it.
  6. Rule of diversity: There’s rarely a single right way.
  7. Rule of extensibility: Design for the future.
  1. ↩

    Eric Steven Raymond, “Basics of the Unix Philosophy,” 2003, http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html. (See notes.)