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Programmers don't actually believe in such falsehoods, nor do they just decide to be lazy about implementation. In fact if anything programmers are generally mo

by sly010 8y ago

Programmers don't actually believe in such falsehoods, nor do they just decide to be lazy about implementation. In fact if anything programmers are generally more aware of such things. A better name for these lists would be "falsehoods businesses insist on despite their engineers warnings".

macintux 8y ago
There are several of those I didn’t know, and wouldn’t likely have discovered them all even with research.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Yup. I mean, every programmer I know considers stuff like this to be very interesting trivia to learn and apply. But even if you know this stuff, putting the knowledge to use often involves a series of battles against your PMs and managers and maybe even customers, who either don't know it, have their own vision, or just follow what everyone else does. (Getting a product to work correctly is as much an exercise of diplomacy and ego management as it is a matter of technical skills.)
- Tor3 8y ago
  I remember a discussion on the Linux kernel list years ago - and I believe Linus himself at one point insisted that names with less than three characters shouldn't be accepted, as they must surely be invalid. I pointed out that when I was a student there was another student with a full name consisting of just a single letter. No first name, no last name, just that letter. And the best thing - the student loans bank's system actually handled that. A couple of times each semester there would be wide fanfold prints on the billboard wall, with each student's name and information about each student's loan application. They apparently had no issues with his single-letter name, which means that the governmental name registration system didn't either. Even though he was a foreigner, and I've never heard about any native person with just a single name (not to mention just a single letter).
  - MockObject 8y ago
    "MySQL ... Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter..." I've also met a few "Jo"s in my time.
  - jolmg 8y ago
    L

by sly010 8y ago

macintux 8y ago

There are several of those I didn’t know, and wouldn’t likely have discovered them all even with research.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

Yup. I mean, every programmer I know considers stuff like this to be very interesting trivia to learn and apply. But even if you know this stuff, putting the knowledge to use often involves a series of battles against your PMs and managers and maybe even customers, who either don't know it, have their own vision, or just follow what everyone else does. (Getting a product to work correctly is as much an exercise of diplomacy and ego management as it is a matter of technical skills.)

Tor3 8y ago
I remember a discussion on the Linux kernel list years ago - and I believe Linus himself at one point insisted that names with less than three characters shouldn't be accepted, as they must surely be invalid. I pointed out that when I was a student there was another student with a full name consisting of just a single letter. No first name, no last name, just that letter. And the best thing - the student loans bank's system actually handled that. A couple of times each semester there would be wide fanfold prints on the billboard wall, with each student's name and information about each student's loan application. They apparently had no issues with his single-letter name, which means that the governmental name registration system didn't either. Even though he was a foreigner, and I've never heard about any native person with just a single name (not to mention just a single letter).
- MockObject 8y ago
  "MySQL ... Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter..." I've also met a few "Jo"s in my time.
- jolmg 8y ago
  L