Pike’s rules 1 and 2 restate Tony Hoare’s famous maxim “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”

Ken Thompson rephrased Pike’s rules 3 and 4 as “When in doubt, use brute force.”

Rules 3 and 4 are instances of the design philosophy KISS.

Rule 5 was previously stated by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month and is often shortened to “write stupid code that uses smart objects”.

FROM:

University of Texas in Austin

Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming

Source

Find the right data structures and the logic becomes easy.

Rule 5 is akin to using types to ensure no illegal states can be expressed.