Chapter 19. Miscellanea

Advice is what we ask for when we already know
the answer but wish we didn't.
Erica Jong
How to Save Your Own Life

This chapter contains a handful of guidelines that do not fit cleanly into any of the previous categories. They cover reasons for revision control, the intricacies of interfacing with other languages, the care and feeding of configuration files, the trouble with tied variables, the complexities of caching, flaws in formats, optimal optimization, and the cunning cruelty of cleverness.