Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming

Re:Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming by andsoitis on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @07:22AM (#47424261)

> This is the biggest issue I see with AI driven development. The data structures are incredibly naive.

Bill Gates, for example, always advocated for thinking through the entire program design and data structures before writing any code, emphasizing that structure is crucial to success.

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Re:Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming by neocron on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @07:34AM (#47424356)

Ah Bill Gates, the epitome of good software

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Re:Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming by andsoitis on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @08:09AM (#47424689)

> Ah Bill Gates, the epitome of good software

While developing Altair BASIC, his choice of data structures and algorithms enabled him to fit the code into just 4 kilobytes.

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Re:Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming by dotancohen on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @08:07AM (#47424672)

Yes, actually. Gates wrote great software.

Microsoft is another story.

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Re:Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming by jll29 on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @08:42AM (#47425050)

And Paul Allen wrote a whole Altair emulator so that they could use an (academic) Harvard computer for their little (commercial) project and test/run Bill Gates' BASIC interpreter on it.

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Re:Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming by PaulDavisThe1st on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @10:35AM (#47426335)

I'd like to see Gates or anyone else do that for a project that lasts (at least) a quarter century and sees a many-fold increase in CPU speed, RAM availability, disk capacity etc.

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