I don't understand your argument though. What have first principles to do with coding, or coding standards?

Someone like Damian Conway has derived each of his 256 best practices in PBP "from first principles". In the interests of development speed, I don't want each member of my team to similarly repeat his research and analysis.

Regarding development speed, the places where a good coding standard has the potential to help is in areas (often "cross-cutting concerns") that are common to many projects and many teams. For example:

• Should I use File::Slurp from CPAN or write my own ... or add one to our library code to be shared with other teams?
• When parsing XML, should I use XML::Simple or XML::LibXML or something else? ... or just use a regex? ;-)
• In my Perl module, should I use '1.23' version numbers or '1.2.3'?
• Should I use C++ Boost shared pointer or write my own "from first principles"? (Update: or wait for ANSI C++ committee std::shared_ptr ;-)
• Ditto for C++ Boost regex (Update: or wait for std::regex - see also Re: Regex match for Any number of words? by davido).
• Error handling.
• Logging.
• Tracing.
• Debugging.
• Memory management.
• Concurrency and locking.
• Thread-safety and reentrancy.
• Exception-safety.
• Portability. I need a cross-platform mutex. How well do C++ templates work on HP-UX? I need file locking or threading that works on both Unix and Windows.
• Libraries. For C++, should I use Boost or something else ... or write my own?
• Documentation. Should I document my C++ code with doxygen or something else? For Perl, POD or Perl comments? BTW, see PBP 7.2: "Create standard POD templates for modules and applications".
• Naming.
• Internationalization and Localization.
• C++ Unit testing/Mocking. Should I use CppUnit or CxxTest or Catch or Boost or GoogleTest/GoogleMock ... or write my own?
• Code review checklists.
• Build and release engineering. e.g. revision control, makefiles, ...
• How do I make a customer patch?

Note: More bullet points were added long after the original reply

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