Laws of Software

Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.

-- Jeff Atwood, 2009

Adding [human resources] to a late software project makes it later.

-- Fred Brooks, 1975

Consider how you would solve your immediate problem without adding anything new.

-- Dan McKinley, 2015

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

-- Melvin Conway, 1968

The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.

-- Ward Cunningham, 1980

We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.

-- John Doerr, 2015

The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and the size of the target.

-- Paul Fitts, 1954

A complex system that works has evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system built from scratch won’t work.

-- John Gall, 1975

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

-- Charles Goodhart, 1975

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

-- Philip Greenspun,

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

-- Douglas Hofstadter, 1979

With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.

-- Hyrum Wright, 2012

In cryptography, a system should be secure even if everything about the system, except for a small piece of information - the key - is public knowledge.

-- Auguste Kerckhoffs, 1883

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

-- Brian Kernighan, 1974

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

-- Donald Knuth, 1974

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

-- Joel Spolsky, 2002

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

-- Linus Torvalds, 1999

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

-- Ada Lovelace, 1842

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.

-- Gordon Moore, 1965

Any technology that surpasses 50% penetration will never double again.

-- Peter Norvig, 1999

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

-- Cyril Parkinson, 1955

People in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence."

-- Laurence J. Peter, 1969

Be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept.

-- Jon Postel, 1980

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

-- Clay Shirky, 2010

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

-- Niklaus Wirth, 1995

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

-- James Zawinski, 1995