laws

Moore's law

"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year."

Amdahl's law

"The overall performance improvement is limited by the fraction of the time the improved part can be used."

Conway's law

"Organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

Occam's razor

"Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity."

Hanlon's razor

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Pareto principle

"For many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes."

Dunning-Kruger effect

"People with low ability at a task overestimate their ability."

NIH syndrome

"If it wasn't invented here, we don't want it."

Second-system syndrome

"The second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs."

Murphy's law

"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."

Postel's law (Robustness principle)

"Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."

Linus's law

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

Brooks's law

"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."

Eagleson's law

"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else."

Peter principle

"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

Hofstadter's law

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

Hoare's law of large programs

"Inside every large program there is a small program trying to get out."

The 90-90 rule

"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time."

Parkinson's law

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

Sayre's law

"In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake."

Parkinson's law of triviality

"The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved."

Kerckhoffs's principle

"A cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is public knowledge."

Knuth's optimization principle

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."

Rule of Least Power

"Use the least powerful language suitable for expressing information, constraints or programs on the World Wide Web."

Dilbert principle

"The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management."

Chesterton's fence

"Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place."

Sturgeon's law

"Ninety percent of everything is crud."

Reed's law

"The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network."

Goodhart's law

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

Lindy's law

"The future life expectancy of some non-perishable thing is proportional to its current age."

Zawinski's law

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

Greenspun's tenth rule

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

Hyrum's law

"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."

Price's law

"The square root of the number of people in a domain does 50 percent of the work."

Law of Demeter

"Only talk to your immediate friends."

Gall's law

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."

Wirth's law

"Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

Norvig's law

"It takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including programming."

Metcalfe's law

"The effect of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system."

Liddle's law

"A company big enough to have a research lab is too big to know what to do with the research results."

Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience

"Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. Design for patterns for which users are accustomed."

Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology

"There is always one more bug." (original?)

Bram's law

"The easier a piece of software is to write, the worse it's implemented in practice."

Proebsting's law

"Compiler advances double computing power every 18 years."