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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_one_infinity_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_one_infinity_rule

• piekvorst 11mo ago
  Nice article, never seen that. I’ve always thought it’s good practice for a system to declare its limits upfront. That feels more honest than promising ”infinity” but then failing to scale in practice. Prematurely designing for infinity can also cause over-engineering—like using quicksort on an array of four elements. Scale isn’t a binary choice between “off” and “infinity.” It’s a continuum we navigate with small, deliberate, and often painful steps—not a single, massive, upfront investment. That said, I agree the ZOI is a valuable guideline for abstraction, though less so for implementation.
  • o11c 11mo ago
    There's a reason I prefer "lots" over "infinity". For your "quicksort of 4 elements" example, I would note that the algorithm doesn't care - it still works - and the choice of when to switch to insertion sort is a mere matter of tuning thresholds.
• kragen 11mo ago
  The zero-one-infinity rule is not applicable to the number of bytes in Poly1305 nonces and ChaCha20 keys. They are exceptions.