July 18, 2007 : Global Nerdy

If you’ve read any of the novels in William Gibson’s “Sprawl Series” or anything that borrowed heavily from that body of work, you’re familiar with the concept of 3D objects being used as metaphors for data or programs. Over the years a number of developers have tried to turn this idea into reality, the latest being the folks behind 3D Mailbox, which blends videogame worlds with an email client.

Level 1 of 3D Mailbox is Miami Beach, in which email is represented by a scantily-clad beachgoer. You’ll see your incoming mail tan, swim, and use the shower, complete with suggestive self-scrubbing. Marking and deleting spam is represented by feeding that mail to the sharks in the ocean. Level 2 is Los Angeles Airport, and in that level, your email is represented by planes coming and going.

The concept of 3D Mailbox, coupled with that very cheesy YouTube trailer, is so silly that I’m having trouble thinking that it’s not a joke. I guess I should download the client, install it on my “nothing terribly important goes on this box” Windows desktop at work and take it for a spin.

Moses wielding a cell phone

[This was also cross-posted to the Tucows Developer Blog]

Inspired by Phil Haack’s article 19 Eponymous Laws of Software Development, I decided to collect laws, axioms and rules pertaining to mainstream software development and put them in a nice, easy-to-read table.

This is by no means a complete list of laws; I’ve purposely stuck to the ones that apply to everyday software development and steered clear of the more theoretical ones. Maybe I’ll compile a more complete list someday.

You’ll notice that some of the laws come from the world of biology — they also appear in some lists of software laws, and I think they still apply.

The Law	Who Said It	What it Says
Amdahl’s Law	Gene Amdahl	The speedup gained from running a program on a parallel computer is greatly limited by the fraction of that program that can’t be parallelized.
Augustine’s Second Law of Socioscience	Norman Augustine	For every scientific (or engineering) action, there is an equal and opposite social reaction.
Brooks’ Law	Fred Brooks	Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
Clarke’s First Law	Arthur C. Clarke	When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Clarke’s Second Law	Arthur C. Clarke	The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Clarke’s Third Law	Arthur C. Clarke	Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Conway’s Law	Melvin Conway	Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.
Cope’s Rule	Edward Drinker Cope	There is a general tendency toward size increase in evolution.
Dilbert Principle	Scott Adams	The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.
Ellison’s Law of Cryptography and Usability	Carl Ellison	The userbase for strong cryptography declines by half with every additional keystroke or mouseclick required to make it work.
Ellison’s Law of Data	Larry Ellison	Once the business data have been centralized and integrated, the value of the database is greater than the sum of the preexisting parts.
The Law of False Alerts	George Spafford	As the rate of erroneous alerts increases, operator reliance, or belief, in subsequent warnings decreases.
Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem	R. A. Fisher	The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the less adaptable it is to any new change.
Fitts’ Law	Paul Fitts	The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and the size of the target.
Flon’s Axiom	Lawrence Flon	There does not now, nor will there ever, exist a programming language in which it is the least bit hard to write bad programs.
Gilder’s Law	George Gilder	Bandwidth grows at least three times faster than computer power.
Godwin’s Law	Mike Godwin	As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
Grosch’s Law	Herb Grosch	The cost of computing systems increases as the square root of the computational power of the systems.
Hartree’s Law	Douglas Hartree	Whatever the state of a project, the time a project-leader will estimate for completion is constant.
Heisenbug Uncertainty Principle	Jim Gray	Most production software bugs are soft: they go away when you look at them.
Hick’s Law	William Edmund Hick	The time to make a decision is a function of the possible choices he or she has.
Hoare’s Law of Large Programs	C. A. R. Hoare	Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out.
Hofstadter’s Law	Douglas Hofstadter	A task always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience	Jakob Nielsen	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.
Joy’s Law	Bill Joy	smart(employees) = log(employees), or “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”
Kerckhoffs’ Principle	Auguste Kerckhoffs	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.
Linus’ Law	Eric S. Raymond, who named it after Linus Torvalds	Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
Lister’s Law	Timothy Lister	People under time pressure don’t think faster.
Metcalfe’s Law	Robert Metcalfe	In network theory, the value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.
Moore’s Law	Gordon Moore	The number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double in about 18 months.
Murphy’s Law	Captain Edward A. Murphy	If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it.
Nathan’s First Law	Nathan Myhrvold	Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.
Ninety-ninety Law	Tom Cargill	The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.
Occam’s Razor	William of Occam	The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.
Osborn’s Law	Don Osborn	Variables won’t; constants aren’t.
Postel’s Law (the second clause of the Robustness Principle)	Jon Postel	Be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept.
Pareto Principle (a.k.a. “The 80-20 Rule”)	Suggested by Joseph Juran, named after Vilifredo Pareto	For many phenomena, 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.
Parkinson’s Law	C. Northcote Parkinson	Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Pesticide Paradox	Bruce Beizer	Every method you use to prevent or find bugs leaves a residue of subtler bugs against which those methods are ineffectual.
The Peter Principle	Laurence J. Peter	In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
Reed’s Law	David P. Reed	The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, scales exponentially with the size of the network.
Rock’s Law	Arthur Rock	The cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years.
Sixty-sixty Rule	Robert Glass	Sixty percent of software’s dollar is spent on maintenance, and sixty percent of that maintenance is enhancement.
Spector’s Law	Lincoln Spector	The time it takes your favorite application to complete a given task doubles with each new revision.
Spafford’s Adoption Rule	George Spafford	For just about any technology, be it an operating system, application or network, when a sufficient level of adoption is reached, that technology then becomes a threat vector.
Sturgeon’s Revelation	Theodore Sturgeon	Ninety percent of everything is crud.
Tesler’s Law of Conservation as Complexity	Larry Tesler	You cannot reduce the complexity of a given task beyond a certain point. Once you’ve reached that point, you can only shift the burden around.
Weibull’s Power Law	Waloddi Weibull	The logarithm of failure rates increases linearly with the logarithm of age.
Wirth’s Law	Niklaus Wirth	Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.
Zawinski’s Law	Jamie Zawinski	Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.