Back in the late 70's, I was working in England for International Computers Limited on mainframes and programming in a high-level assembly language (no, that's not a contradiction in terms) on a financial programming language called PROSPER.

At this time I also started working with my first mentor, Arthur Richards.

Arthur was a very interesting person. He looked like he should be working on a construction site rather than leading a programming team. He continuously smoked non filtered cigarettes and had the yellow/black stained fingers to prove it. But he totally understood programming and was able to impart that knowledge to others. He took me under his wing. One of the first books he pointed me at was The Elements of Programming Style by Brian Kernigan and P. J. Plauger. written in the style of The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr.

This book (along with others like The Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks, changed my life. These are books that are as valid today as there were when they were first released and should be required reading for everybody working on software projects.

When The Elements of Programming Style first came out, the PC revolution was just starting. Unix and C were taking off and becoming popular in the computer industry (as opposed to just in academia). Object oriented programming being the norm was still many years off (I still remember the special August 1981 Smalltalk issue of BYTE magazine that got me interested in it). Bjarne Stroustrup was still thinking about what the first version of C++ would look like and James Gosling had Emacs on his mind in those days (not NeWS or Java).

The book included a summary of the rules. which somebody has thoughtfully made available online. At the time I borrowed this book, I made some notes. I went back and looked at them this weekend. It's interesting to see that with a very few exceptions (mainly the FORTRAN specific ones), these elements are still applicable to the programming world of today. Nowadays there are of course other sets of elements specific to object-oriented programming that should be appended to this list.