A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
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Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#2> A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe in.
No, these "awesome" lists are seldom curated. They are just dumps of hundreds or thousands of links.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#3It feels like many of these speak to poorly defined requirements.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#4falsehood n+1: it is a good idea to compile a long lists of falsehoods, based on information from random websites.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#5"Falsehoods programmers believe about geography: Street adresses contain street names.
In many remote places in Europe, the hamlet name is considered a sufficient address."
Yup, I used to spend my summers on an island where my address would be: farmstead name, island, country. Zip code was optional. Had to find creative ways to satisfy various web forms.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#6> A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe in. No, these "awesome" lists are seldom curated . They are just dumps of hundreds or thousands of links.
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Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#7> valid email address exactly has one @ character
A normal email address exactly has one @ character. There is an infinite number of possible weird things everyone has little though non-zero chance to encounter on every corner of their life.
> therefore your implementation should allow this
I wouldn't be sure it should. Implementing support for this has direct and indirect, explicit and implicit costs one will have to consider and decide if that's worth it.
In fact, whatever a human can believe about the world, it won't equal what actually is. So we just take decisions about how precise our models have to be to be practical.
You can never finish a program if you insist it has to be perfect and unbreakable. The only reasonable objective is to make sure it does the job 99.9 % of real-life times.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#8falsehood n+1: it is a good idea to compile a long lists of falsehoods, based on information from random websites.
I think the falsehood is:
Bookmarking poorly organized lists will make you avoid all their pitfalls.
Also:
Lists from the Internet are correct.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#9falsehood n+1: it is a good idea to compile a long lists of falsehoods, based on information from random websites.
Well, it's a good start and it contains, so it seems, valid sources. So at least its a little entertaining to browse through and learn a little.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#10Better title would be, "list of common simplifying assumptions programmers and designers make."
Avoiding all these assumptions will introduce unacceptable complexity for many projects. In many of the listed cases, making the assumption will require a tiny fraction of your addressable market to use a workaround, which they are likely already used to using with other products.
So there is a cost-benefit study to be done here. You have finite engineering time. Which of these assumptions can you avoid with little net increase in complexity? Which ones are actually simplifying? Which ones will cause critical problems for your users? And which ones are too expensive to fix given the return on investment?
I think the content of lists like this are decently useful, but the tone is condescending and unwarranted. I don't "believe" that everyone has a first middle and last name. I do believe that people with fifteen names are capable of leaving out some of the ones in the middle, and it makes my job a lot easier to require them to do so.