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Programming Theorems

A list of rules, listed by Des by his experience in programming.

• The Ubiquity of Perl

  The likelihood of Perl being involved in a system is directly proportional to the length of time the system has been in maintenance.

• Boasting

  If you boast about how quickly you developed your product, people will complain about its performance. (Rails)

  If you boast about how well your product runs, people will complain about its development time. (Vista)

  If you don't boast about either, people will assume you are developing in Java.

• Fitts Law

  If you can't click it easily after 3 cans of beer, then it's too small. (iTunes)

• Fileformats

  Think twice before presuming that CSV is a nice little easy file format. (see Leon)

• Web 2.0:

  For every 1.6 billion dollar buy out, there are 1.6 million start-ups in garages digging their own websites.

• Startups 1

  If your target market is the readers of digg, reddit, and delicious then you're trying to sell shelves to a carpenter. If he really wanted them, he would have built them himself, years ago.

• Startups 2

  If you build it, they might come. If you have a nice website they might stay. If you offer a free service, they might use it. If you've gotten this far without thinking about where the cash comes from , you're in trouble.

• Software Development:

  For every Architecture Astronaut out there, there is at least one coder who thinks that being "Agile" is a perfect substitute for foresight.

• Learning programming languages

  Every 5 minutes you spend writing code in a new language is more useful than 5 hours reading blog posts about how great the language is.