Experienced faculty tend to teach programming principles and practices as part of all programming courses on a purely ad hoc basis. In general, there is no agreement on a short list of generally accepted principles and practices as key points for students to learn, and such a list is also conspicuous by its absence in mainstream college textbooks used in “principles of programming” classes. In this paper we provide a starting list of programming principles that are applicable to all major programming languages. The authors used their teaching experience in programming and a broad set of textbooks in an attempt to assess current coverage and select a baseline set of principles aimed at assuring competency of our students as programmer. This paper presents results of an initial pilot survey administered with the aim of discovering an initial list of such principles.