It’s not that I think it’s a bad book, or an unimportant idea – it’s that I think he could’ve been more succint with the delivery.

Also, my own (albeit limited) experience has been more shades of gray and subjectivity than he seems to convey in his book.

Zero tolerance seems alright if you’ve got a perfectly tuned asshole detecter; I think I get this type of judgement wrong frequently. So while an asshole enabled perspective seems useful, I’m not so sure I’d trust a rule.

In the Elements of Style, William Strunk describes one of his pricinples of composition Omit needless words by saying

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

These words resonate with me; I hold a similar view about how software should be written and as I read this book a number of its rules & principles seem to apply equally to writing good software. This makes sense since the majority of code we write is in English. It seems to me that every developer who aspires to be their best would do well to aquire this guide; so, I’ve added this book to my list of books every software developer should own.