go: proverbs

Rob Pike at Gopherfest on November 18, 2015 mentioned several thoughtful go proverbs, as you may see on this video. Here they are:

1. Don’t communicate by sharing memory, share memory by communicating.
2. Concurrency is not parallelism.
3. Channels orchestrate; mutexes serialize.
4. The bigger the interface, the weaker the abstraction.
5. Smaller the interface, more useful.
6. Make the zero value useful.
7. interface{} says nothing.
8. Gofmt’s style is no one’s favorite, yet gofmt is everyone favorite.
9. A little copying is better than a little dependency.
10. Syscall must always be guarded with build tags.
11. Cgo must always be guarded with build tags.
12. Cgo is not Go.
13. With the unsafe package there are no guarantees.
14. Clear is better then clever.
15. Reflection is never clear.
16. Errors are values.
17. Don’t just check errors, handle them gracefully.
18. Design the architecture, name the components, document the details.
19. Documentation is for users.

Many more proverbs possible, but they must be short, poetic, general, about Go more than about programming. Contradictory is OK. Life and programming are full of contradictions.

Greg Osuri made Go proverbs illustrated.