I enjoyed this coding manual prepared by University of Chicago economics professors Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro for their research assistants. It’s a great short manual on how to code for clarity and performance. Considering the vast amount of really bad code that is produced in academia, it’s nice to see a focus on this sort of thing from professors. I especially enjoyed the parts where they give professional software developers too much credit. For example, here’s an assertion:

Real programmers write “unit tests” for every piece of code they write.

Would that that were true.