alt Hacker NewsPretty good list, but a hidden assumption is that the reader works in an imperative style. For instance, recursion is the bread and butter of functional and logical programming and is just fine.
The most important advice one can give to programmers is to
1. Know your problem domain.
2. Think excessively deep about a conceptual model that captures the
relevant aspects of your problem domain.
3. Be anal about naming your concepts. Thinking about naming oftentimes
feeds back to (1) and (2), forming a loop.
4. Use a language and type system that is powerful enough to implement
previous points.
I got this sense as well, particularly from the section about assertions. Most of the use cases they describe (e.g checking function arguments and return values) are much better handled by an expressive type system than ad-hoc checks.