pearls

Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls - I just love the way Jon Bentley writes.

The classic Programming Pearls is not exactly a book of problems, but a book of ideas.

Sometimes less is more and the pearls of wisdom of society at large certainly qualify.

Here are some pearls from it: > Nothing useful is ever created at a hackathon.

It'd be pearls before swine (if all the comments are terrible, then the people who bother reading the comments are likely also terrible).

Even on a place like HN, some commenters will ignore all the evidence, back away from the available data and disperse their anecdotal pearls of wisdom.

There is a great article in one of the Programming Pearls books (so, published earlier), that goes over how providing provenance in a data format is highly useful.

Seconding Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley.

Hold my handbag so I can clutch my pearls.

The problem is that a certain contingent of people clutch their pearls at the mere thought that they may be tempted from the way of Free Software by having a file that tells how to get a file that may offend their sensibilities.

However, there are still people in the world who want to show off their financial status, and have the means to do so by wearing gold watches, jewellery, diamonds, pearls, etc.

Much like the noise over the loss of O(1) string indexing, worries about automatic bounds checks seem to be nothing more than developers clutching their pearls over antiquated best practices that amount to premature optimization at best.

In addition to Programming Pearls I would also add "Software Tools" by Kernighan and Plauger.

I have trouble finding the "Programming Pearls" of various topics.

In my eyes then and now, I wasn't trolling, I was throwing pearls to pigs; I posted a "wall of text" which I had indeed thought about quite a bit in a forum where 99% of all responses to anything ever posted is just "you're doing a great job, keep it up, it would be so great if everybody was aware that you're just so great".

Workaround: I add those names and many others to the list of words to be highlighted on HN (Pearls extension)...