Most of these lists (at least the ones I scanned through) are simply assertions, with no explanations, examples, or links. This is less than useful, and makes me doubt their veracity.
A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
31–40 of 128 posts
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#32"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.
In puerto rico up until very recently (with some lagging behind) it is the condominium building name, apt # and a zip code.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#33I think the lesson to take from these lists is that covering every edge case for many real-world situations becomes asymptotically difficult. You can get 95% with no effort at all, 99% with a bit of thought, 99.9% with some effort, 99.99% with a smart design, some research, and a lot of effort, and anything further requires making it your full-time job indefinitely. It gets thornier when it comes to personal things l…
In regards to your last line, I feel like we do need to give people some leeway and not assume bigoted intent. Most of the things we can gig people for not implementing nowadays are only recently important in our cultural consciousness. English has traditionally shied away from using accents and one can reasonably assume that if a person signs up for my English language website, they won't be using Chinese characters…
Definitely old software that's obviously not getting updated can be forgiven. There's still 16-bit DOS software used in production that harkens from the time when ASCII was all that could be supported. I get it, it sucks when a legacy airline system written in the '70 removes the accent characters from your name but them's the breaks. But if you're designing new software nowadays and your requirements don't include the "new cultural consciousness," you're probably making a big mistake. I've seen software built within the last 5 years fail QA due to not displaying emoji.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#34I think the lesson to take from these lists is that covering every edge case for many real-world situations becomes asymptotically difficult. You can get 95% with no effort at all, 99% with a bit of thought, 99.9% with some effort, 99.99% with a smart design, some research, and a lot of effort, and anything further requires making it your full-time job indefinitely. It gets thornier when it comes to personal things l…
> ...it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases...
I think that is an unfair accusation.
I've been coding for over 20 years, and I have only had to enable UTF8 to cover all corners of use cases (web based data/content) to special characters. I work with companies in multiple foreign countries, and my biases are irrelevant to technically working systems.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#35Here's one I haven't seen on a list: When you onboard to a new company, they will automatically give you access to whatever systems you need to do your job. or It will be automatic or easy to get access to all the systems you need to do your job.
When you onboard to a new company, they will automatically give you access to whatever systems you need to do your job.
Related: When you're hired to be a computer programmer, the company will have a computer for you on your first day of work.
This happened to me twice. The first time at a low-rent startup where people were expected to bring their own machines. (Company folded months later amid an unrelated government investigation.) The second time was when the previous programmer did something unpleasant to the computer on his way out, and the company's procurement process for getting replacement gear required lots of approvals because dev machines are higher-spec and more expensive than an ordinary office computer.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#36Is there an easy way to display a diff which shows all the new links since the last time this was on HN? (Sept. 8th, 2020) Partial list: Falsehoods about Airline Seat Maps https://duffel.com/blog/falsehoods-about-seat-maps Falsehoods about Biometrics https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/falsehoods-programmers-beli... Falsehoods about Plain Text https://jeremyhussell.blogspot.com/2017/11/falsehoods-progra...
For those who haven't seen this before, the ones you should look at first are:
Falsehoods about Names https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
Falsehoods about Time https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
Falsehoods about Addresses https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#37This is a fantastic read.
> "Time passes at the same speed on top of a mountain and at the bottom of a valley".
Just curious, does this kind of gravitational time dilation bear any consequence in our systems, given that we are building systems with the assumption that system clocks are not always accurate and there is no global time?
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#38I think the lesson to take from these lists is that covering every edge case for many real-world situations becomes asymptotically difficult. You can get 95% with no effort at all, 99% with a bit of thought, 99.9% with some effort, 99.99% with a smart design, some research, and a lot of effort, and anything further requires making it your full-time job indefinitely. It gets thornier when it comes to personal things l…
> ...it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases... I think that is an unfair accusation. I've been coding for over 20 years, and I have only had to enable UTF8 to cover all corners of use cases (web based data/content) to special characters. I work with companies in multiple foreign countries, and my biases are irrelevant to technically working systems.
The bias in this is whatever belief system one might have to say "ASCII is good enough". Or whatever level of ignorance to believe that ASCII is good enough without understanding that it cannot be. Etc.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#39I think the lesson to take from these lists is that covering every edge case for many real-world situations becomes asymptotically difficult. You can get 95% with no effort at all, 99% with a bit of thought, 99.9% with some effort, 99.99% with a smart design, some research, and a lot of effort, and anything further requires making it your full-time job indefinitely. It gets thornier when it comes to personal things l…
In regards to your last line, I feel like we do need to give people some leeway and not assume bigoted intent. Most of the things we can gig people for not implementing nowadays are only recently important in our cultural consciousness. English has traditionally shied away from using accents and one can reasonably assume that if a person signs up for my English language website, they won't be using Chinese characters…
Yeah, it's probably wrong to assume much about a lack of support for Chinese-character names on an English-language website, so I removed that. (But if you don't have a good reason not to, you should support it.)
Accents and punctuation are different. There are a lot of English-speaking people whose names don't fit in ASCII. A system that doesn't support them is at the "95% for no effort" stage, if even that.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#40Better 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 don…
> 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. Sure, if you handle it gracefully and give them ample space to squeeze their names onto one field and your system not making fuss about it. People that tend to have fiften names also tend to come from areas that may use accented characters, have suffixes a…
> Carla Rodriguez y Calderón (both Rodriguez and Calderón are last names)
I was not aware of this form until I moved to New Mexico several years ago. I had a hyphenated name earlier in life, and have come to think of this as a (roughly) Spanish equivalent of that.
If you can't/don't handle Ortiz y Pino in New Mexico, several fairly powerful people are going to be pretty pissed off! And that's still within the borders of the USA.