Awesome Falsehoods Programmers Believe

A collection of resources about falsehoods programmers believe to know.

Things that look simple at a first glance might have a hidden complexity unter the hood:

• When you grew up in a western country you might expect that every person's name is made up of a first and a last name.
• A programmers from the US might assume that each country is devided into states and therefore an address must contain a state name to be valid.
• Developers from Central Europa might neglect time zones, because they never experienced time zone differences when traveling into a neighboring country.
• Math teaches us that 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.3, but is that true in computer languages?

This is a list about articles that are worth reading when you are a software engineer or you just wonder about the hidden complexity developers have to deal with.

You might want to start reading: Doing Terrible Things To Your Code

Falsehoods about Individuals

• Names
• Gender

Falsehoods about Addresses and Geography

• Addresses
• Geography
• Map
• Phone Numbers, Phone Numbers

Internationalization

• Why flags do not represent languages
• Why is there no standardised way to select a country from a list in HTML
• Falsehoods programmers believe about prices and currencies

Falsehoods about Time and Time Zones

• Time, Time
• Time Zones

Falsehoods about Computers and Programming

• Programming
• Build Systems
• Distributed Computing
• Floating-Point Arithmetic
• Networks
• Shutdown Hooks
• Unicode
• Versions
• Hardware, Network, Programming

Misc

• Online Shopping
• Job Applicants
• Various Topics

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-list-item)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add a new list item')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-list-item)
5. Create new Pull Request

License

To the extent possible under law, Martin Spickermann has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.