The Right Tool

The Right Tool is an interesting site that allows developers to rank how well a given statement applies to various programming languages. When I mentioned this to a colleague, he recommended Peter Van Roy's Programming Paradigms for Dummies: What Every Programmer Should Know. I haven't had time to read it yet, but from the abstract it seems to be about choosing concepts that are best suited for a given problem, and then choosing a programming language that best supports those concepts.

Hints for Computer System Design

Butler W. Lampson's Hints for Computer System Design. The slogans are summarized in the table below (Figure 1 in the paper):

	Functionality	Speed	Fault-tolerance
Completeness	Separate normal and worst case	Shed load
		End-to-end	End-to-end
		Safety first
Interface	Do one thing well	Make it fast	End-to-end
	Don't generalize	Split resources	Log updates
	Get it right	Static analysis	Make actions atomic
	Don't hide power	Dynamic translation
	Use procedure arguments
	Leave it to the client
	Keep basic interfaces stable
	Keep a place to stand
Implementation	Plan to throw one away	Cache answers	Make actions atomic
	Keep secrets	Use brute force	Use hints
	Use a good idea again	Compute in background
	Divide and conquer	Batch processing