software laws

I forget these. But these are real and totally valid rules of the craft. It’s the law!

• Conway’s Law - You Ship Your Org Chart
• Moore’s Law - Compute power of manufactured chips doubles every two years.
• Law of Demeter (LoD) - also known as the principal of least knowledge. A general guideline for decoupled software components.
• Brook’s Law - adding people to a late project only makes it later.
• Tesler’s Law - “Complexity can neither be created nor destroyed, only moved somewhere else.”
• Gall’s Law - A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
• Hyrum’s Law - All intended and unintended behaviors of an API will be depended on by somebody. AKA, when you ship a bug, that is now your product, officially. “Fixing” that bug will break someone’s workflow.
• 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.