Programming Philosophies

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Last summer I was coaching some of my students into getting a tech job, and one of them came to me saying he was asked a tricky question about some “philosophy” stuff. My fault, I know, I didn´t teach them anything of this.

There are many different philosophies that have influenced the way that people approach programming and software development. Some of the most influential of these philosophies include:

• “Code is law” — This philosophy holds that code is the ultimate authority in a system and that it should be treated with the utmost care and respect. This means that code should be written in a clear, concise, and maintainable manner and that it should be subject to rigorous testing and review.
• “Less is more” — This philosophy suggests that simplicity is key in software development. The idea is that complex systems are harder to understand and maintain and that it is generally better to focus on solving a specific problem or meeting a specific need rather than trying to build a feature-complete system.
• “Write once, run anywhere” — This philosophy is often associated with programming languages and platforms that are designed to be portable, such as Java and Python. The goal of this philosophy is to make it easy to write code that can be run on multiple different platforms without requiring any changes or special handling.