I referred to Bruce J. MacLennan’s Principles of Programming Languages in my previous post, then discovered I can’t find the list anywhere on the ‘net, at least not as I was taught them. They are (AFIK) derived from his book, also named Principles of Programming Languages, so it may not be precisely kosher to put them online, but I’m going to post a copy anyway, because they are terribly useful to refer to.
- Abstraction: Avoid requiring something to be stated more than once; factor out the recurring pattern.
- Automation: Automate mechanical, tedious, or error-prone activities.
- Defense in Depth: Have a series of defenses so that if an error is not caught by one, it will probably be caught by another.
- Elegance: Confine your attention ot designs that look good because they are good.
- Impossible Error: Making errors impossible to commit is preferable to detecting them after their commission.
- Information Hiding: The languages should permit modules designed so that (1) the user has all of the information needed ot use the module correctly, and nothing more, and (2) the implementer has all the information needed to implement the module correctly, and nothing more.
- Labeling: Avoid arbitrary sequences more than a few items long. Do not require the user to know the absolute position of an item in a list. Instead, associate a meaningful label with each item and allow the items to occur in any order.
- Localized Cost: users should pay only for what they use; avoid distributed costs.
- Manifest Interface: All interfaces should be apparent (manifest) in the syntax.
- Orthogonality: independent functions should be controlled by independent mechanisms.
- Portability: Avoid features or facilities that are dependent on a particular computer or a small class of computers.
- Preservation of Information: The languages should allow the representation of information that the user might know and that the compiler might need.
- Regularity: Regular rules, without exceptions, are easier to learn, use, describe, and implement.
- Responsible Design: Do not ask users what they want, find out what they need.
- Security: No program that violates the definition of the language, or its own intended structure, should escape detection.
- Simplicity: A language should be as simple as possible. There should be a minimum number of concepts, with simple rules for their combination.
- Structure: the static structure of the program should correspond in a simple way to the dynamic structure of the corresponding computations.
- Syntactic Consistency: Similar things should look similar, different things different.
- Zero-One-Infinity: The only reasonable numbers are zero, one, and infinity.
- Avoid Creeping Featurism: Do not add features which are expensive to implement and rarely used. [I think Rafi added this one himself, but I learned them from him, so here it stays. Also, I feel like there was a more elegant phrasing presented at some point.]
I’m not entirely fond of all the rules, particularly 6 and 7, which encourage trusting other people’s code and space inefficiency respectively, but it is generally a wonderful compact way of evaluating languages, that should resonate with anyone who programs.
