I think #5, which is probably going to be thought of as great wisdom for our age, is secretly an empty tautology. That is, my amateurish work in schemas and validating data structures and type systems has led me to think that there is a somewhat hard-to-see but extremely-important bijection between data structures and the control structures that consume them. (In many ways this is theoretically a non-issue as there are Church and Scott encodings of those data structures, but I think it also extends lists to for-loops and not just folds.) Seen that way it's really just saying "the most important part of the algorithm is figuring out the right basic control structures to build the algorithm out of." Well, yeah, that's what programming is.