Good Entropy

SQLite As An Application File Format

A clear, concise, and easy to understand file format is a crucial part of any application design. Fred Brooks, in his all-time best-selling computer science text, The Mythical Man-Month says:

Representation is the essence of computer programming.
…
Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious.

Rob Pike, in his Rules of Programming expresses the same idea this way:

Data dominates. If you’ve chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.

Linus Torvalds used different words to say much the same thing on the Git mailing list on 2006-06-27:

Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.