Comment by mrweasel
8 years ago
I really like rule 5. It's can be extremely hard to get data structures right, but you really notice when you do. I had the chance to redo a project, and the biggest chances was to how data was structured and it made a world of difference.
I have found this to be true as well. The first thing I do whenever reviewing an open source project is to examine the database schema. I can usually figure out what the code does and how it works by looking at the tables and the relationships between them.
Linus agrees: „…git actually has a simple design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In fact, I'm a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it's one of the reasons git has been fairly successful […] I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.“