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The Zen of Javascript

I ran across PEP 20 — The Zen of Python by Tim Peters, and figured very little needs to be changed to make it a valid javascript zen:

  • 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 Doug.
  • 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! let’s fake those!

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