The phenomena surrounding computers are diverse and yield a surprisingly rich base for launching metaphors at individual and group activities. Conversely, classical human endeavors provide an inexhaustible source of metaphor for those of us who are in labor within computation. The epigrams that follow attempt to capture some of the dimensions of this traffic in imagery that sharpens, focuses, clarifies, enlarges, and beclouds our view of this most remarkable of all mans' artifacts, the computer. One man's constant is another man's variable. Structure data late in the programming process.
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.
Every program is a part of some other program and rarely fits perfectly. If a program manipulates a large amount of data, it does so in a small number of ways. It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one. A programming language in which the irrelevant is as portentious as the critical in programs is a low order language. It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures.