System Philosophy

• No news is good news
• Do one thing and do it well
• Don't repeat yourself
• Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
• Don't reinvent the wheel
• Follow the standard
• Convention over configuration
• With freedom comes responsibility
• Use flat text file
• Save data in plain string
• Least surprise
• Premature optimization is the root of all evil

Programming Philosophy

• Beautiful is better than ugly
• Explicit is better than implicit
• Simple is better than complex
• Complex is better than complicated
• Flat is better than nested
• Sparse is better than dense
• Readability counts
• Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules
• Although practicality beats purity
• Errors should never pass silently
• Unless explicitly silenced
• In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess
• There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it
• Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch
• Now is better than never
• Although never is often better than *right* now
• If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea
• If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea
• Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

Quotes

• John Gall, from Systemantics, as quoted in Chapter 1. Government As a Platform
  A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over beginning with a working simple system