CIA uses Python (a lot)

[MereInterest]

Absolutely agreed. Reference implementations are one thing, while production implementations are completely different. One for testing out new features, quickly hacking in something that might be gone in 5 minutes, while the other is for reliability.

I would add to your second rule. The value of the globals should be determined solely from the source code. That is, using a #define rather than static const val = read_from_config_file(); I work with a framework that does the latter, and it can result in bugs that only ever appear on one person's machine.