Personally, I'll have to quote "The Zen of Python" by Tim Peters. It tells Python programmers what their code should look like, but I find that it applies to basically all code.
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!
