Eponymous Laws

We stand on the shoulders of giants. Or at least, those who suffered that we might not, and so we should respect our elders. I do, and this is a list of places I'd prefer to lean on experience than relearn the hard way:

  • Cunningham's Law: The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is to post the wrong answer and wait for people to correct you.
  • LeBlanc's Law: Later == Never
  • Brooke's Law: Adding developers to a late software project makes it later.
  • Hyrum's Law: All observable behaviors of your system are depended on by someone.
  • Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time available for it's completion.
  • Pareto Principle: For any phenomonon, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes.
  • Hofstatter's Law: Everything takes longer than you think it will, even when accounting for Hofstatter's Law.
  • Conway's Law: Any software reflects the organization that built it.
  • Linus's Law: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
  • Wirth's Law: Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.
  • Zawinksi's Law: Every program expands until it can read email. Those which can't are replaced by those that can.
  • Sturgeon's Revelation: 90% of everything is crud.
  • Stein's Law: If it can't go on forever, it'll stop.
  • Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
  • Wiio's Law: Communication fails except by accident.
  • Macnamara Fallacy: Making decisions based on both measurable data and ignoring unmeasurable data is suicidal.
  • Trust but verify: (Russian: доверяй, но проверяй, tr. doveryay, no proveryay, IPA: dəvʲɪˈrʲæj no prəvʲɪˈrʲæj) is a Russian proverb, which is rhyming in Russian. The phrase became internationally known in English after Suzanne Massie, a scholar of Russian history, taught it to Ronald Reagan, then president of the United States, the latter of whom used it on several occasions in the context of nuclear disarmament discussions with the Soviet Union.
  • Wright's Law: The more times a task has been performed, the less time is required on each subsequent iteration.
  • Hyrum's Law: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.
  • Layne’s Law – “A) Every debate is over the definition of a word, B) every debate eventually degenerates into debating the definition of a word, or C) once a debate degenerates into debating the definition of a word, the debate is debatably over.”
  • Lamport's Law - If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.
  • Mellon's Law - Everyone wants to make an API, but nobody wants to use one.

While it's not a law, it should be. Cunningham said: "If software is not periodically rewritten to communicate what we've learned, then the software will lack any sense at all eventually."