Guiding Principles for Any Developer

I recently learned of the existence of some guiding principles for the Python programming language's design. They are summed up in twenty aphorisms, though only nineteen of them have been written down.

As a fun easter egg, you can find them by opening a Python interpreter in interactive mode (usually just by typing python into a terminal window if you have Python installed already) by entering import this.

You will be presented with what long-time "Pythoneer" Tim Peters has succinctly written:

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.
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!

While these aphorisms are specifically written in the context of Python, I find them applicable to software design as a whole, as well as programming projects large or small.