carbon-lang/docs/project/principles

Principles

Some language goals will have widely-applicable, high-impact, and sometimes non-obvious corollaries. We collect concrete language design principles in this directory as a way to document and clarify these. Principles clarify, but do not supersede, goals and priorities. Principles should be used as a tool in making decisions, and to clarify to contributors how decisions are expected to be made.

A key difference between a principle and the design of a language feature is that a principle should inform multiple designs, whereas a feature's design is typically more focused on achieving a specific goal or set of goals. The principle can help achieve consistency across those multiple designs.

Note that these principles seek to establish both the approaches the project wants to pursue, as well as those we want to exclude.

• Errors are values
• Information accumulation
• Low context-sensitivity
• Prefer providing only one way to do a given thing
• Safety strategy
• One static open extension mechanism
• Success criteria