Renaissance Programming/Tenets 2.3

  • The program is the BEST at what it does
  • The program is FAST
  • The footprint is SMALL
  • The code is CLEAR
  • The program is BUG-FREE
  • Abstractions must SIMPLIFY
  • The unnecessary is ELIMINATED
  • The system's resources are CONSERVED

Derived from Futurist Programming/2.2. I'm dropping the Futurist part as I realized I'm not a Futurist! The Futurists chose to ignore the past, to actively revel in forgetting it, while populating the Earth with explosive, mad, new forms in the spirit of incessant and tumultuous progress.

Ignoring the past means repeating its mistakes as the same roads are trod and the same lessons re-learned, all the while, naif-like, self-congratulatory exclamations of cleverness are exchanged. The redundancy! The waste! The hubris! The Futurists, lemming-like drove themselves off a cliff; after their brief, promiscuous, and prodigious debut, they self-destructed, none surviving their aesthetic extinction on the front lines of the Great War.

I'm renaming the Tenets "Renaissance Programming", renaissance meaning rebirth. We should take the lessons, arts, and practices of the past; tear them apart, break them down; synthesize them in a new pattern - add new components, new creativity, new idioms, then refine, distill, refactor, remove the dross, iterate! Until at last the product is born, and that product to be input to the next cycle!

Forsooth, 'tis for the win, huzzah!

programming/manifesto/philosophy

Content by Nick Porcino (c) 1990-2011