Awesome Falsehood

A curated list of awesome falsehoods programmers believe in.

The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.

• Ludwig Wittgenstein

Contents

• Foreword
• Meta
• Arts
• Business
• Dates and Time
• Emails
• Geography
• Human Identity
• Multimedia
• Networks
• Phone Numbers
• Postal Addresses
• Science
• Society
• Software Engineering
• Contributing
• Good Candidates
  • Falsehood Articles
  • Libraries
  • Data Structures
• License

Foreword

Falsehood articles are a form of commentary on a particular subject, and are appreciated by the developer community at large for their effectiveness and terseness. They're a convenient written form to approach an unfamiliar domain by dispelling myths, point out common pitfalls, show inconsistencies and subtleties.

In a sense, Falsehood articles are a suite of wordy unit-tests covering extensive edge-cases provided by real-world usage.

Meta

• Falsehoods Programmers Believe - A brief list of common falsehoods. A great overview and quick introduction into the world of falsehoods.
• Falsehoods About Programming - A humbling and fun list on programming and programmers themselves.
• Falsehoods About Falsehoods Lists - Meta commentary on how these falsehoods shouldn't be handled.

Arts

• Falsehoods About Music - False assumption that might be made in codifying music.

Business

• Falsehoods About Online Shopping - Covers prices, currencies and inventory.
• Falsehoods About Prices - Covers currencies, amounts and localization.
• Falsehoods About IBANs - International Bank Account Numbers are not immune to mistakes.
• Falsehoods About Job Applicants - Assumptions about job applicants and their job histories aren’t necessarily true.
• Falsehoods About Economics - Economics are not simple or rational.
• CLDR currency definitions - Currency validity date ranges overlap due to revolts, invasions, new constitutions, and slow planned adoption.
• tax - A PHP 5.4+ tax management library.

Dates and Time

• Falsehoods About Time - Seminal article on dates and time.
• More Falsehoods About Time - Part. 2 of the article above.
• Falsehoods About Time and Time Zones - Another takes on time-related falsehoods, with an emphasis on time zones.
• Critique of Falsehoods About Time - Takes on the first article above and provides an explanation of each falsehood, with more context and external resources.
• Your Calendrical Fallacy Is Thinking… - List covering intercalation and cultural influence, made by a community of iOS and macOS developers.
• Time Zone Database - Code and data that represent the history of local time for many representative locations around the globe.
• The Long, Painful History of Time - Most of the idiosyncrasies in time keeping can find an explanation in history.
• You Advocate a Calendar Reform - Your idea will not work. This article tells you why.
• So You Want to Abolish Time Zones – Abolishing timezones may sound like a good idea, but there are quite a few complications that make it not quite so.

Emails

• I Knew How to Validate an Email Address Until I Read the RFC - Provides intricate examples that are unsuspected valid emails according the RFC-822.

Geography

• Falsehoods About Geography - Takes on places, their names and locations.
• Falsehoods About Maps - Covers coordinates, projection and GIS.

Human Identity

• Falsehoods About Names - The article that started it all.
• Falsehoods About Gender - Gender is part of human identity and has its own subtleties.
• Gay Marriage: The Database Engineering Perspective - How to store a marriage in a database while addressing most of the falsehoods about gender, naming and relationships.
• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Families - You can't really define a family with strict rules.
• Personal Names Around the World - How do people's names differ around the world, and what are the implications for the Web?
• XKCD #327: Exploits of a Mom - Funny take on how implementation of a falsehood might lead to security holes.
• Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers - Real-life example on how implemented falsehood has negative impact on someone's life.
• HL7 v3 RIM - A flexible data model for representing human names.
• Apple iOS NSPersonNameComponentsFormatter - Localized representations of the components of a person’s name.

Multimedia

• Falsehoods About Video - Cover it all: video decoding and playback, files, image scaling, color spaces and conversion, displays and subtitles.

Networks

• Falsehoods About Networks - Covers TCP, DHCP, DNS, VLANs and IPv4/v6.
• Fallacies of Distributed Computing - Assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make.

Phone Numbers

• Falsehoods About Phone Numbers - Covers phone numbers, their representation and meaning.
• libphonenumber - Google's common Java, C++ and JavaScript library for parsing, formatting, and validating international phone numbers. Also available for C#, Objective-C, Python, Ruby and PHP.

Postal Addresses

• Falsehoods About Addresses - Covers streets, postal codes, buildings, cities and countries.
• Letter Delivered Despite No Name, No Address - Ultimate falsehood about postal addresses: you do not need one.
• libaddressinput - Google's common C++ and Java library for parsing, formatting, and validating international postal addresses.
• addressing - A PHP 5.4+ addressing library, powered by Google's dataset.
• postal-address - Python module to parse, normalize and render postal addresses.

Science

• Falsehoods About Systems of Measurement - On working with systems of measurement and converting between them.

Society

• Falsehoods About Political Appointments - Designing election systems has its own tricks.
• Falsehoods About Women In Tech - Myth about women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) industries.

Software Engineering

• Falsehoods About Versions - Attributing an identity to a software release might be harder than thought.
• Falsehoods About Build Systems - Building software is hard. Building software that builds software is harder.
• Myths About File Paths - Diversity of file-systems and OSes makes file paths a little harder than we might think of.
• Falsehoods About REST APIs - Pitfalls to be mindful of when creating and documenting APIs.
• Falsehoods About CSVs - While RFC4180 to exists, it is far from definitive and goes largely ignored.
• Falsehoods About Package Managers - Covers package and their managers.
• Big List of Naughty Strings - Challenge your assumptions about strings.
• i18n Testing Data - Real-word international and diverse name data for unit testing and QA.

Contributing

Your contributions are always welcome! Please take a look at the contribution guidelines first.

Good Candidates

Here is a non-restrictive list of items which are good candidates for inclusion in this awesome list.

Falsehood Articles

Articles following the falsehood scheme are prime candidates for inclusion in this awesome list.

These articles starts with the hypothesis that developers have a naive, simple view of the subject at hand. Then proceed to list a set of candid assumptions that might be held by such programmers. Each one is intentionally false, and sometimes illustrated by a counter-example.

A list of falsehood is crafted as a progression that is designed to refine concepts. Having read the whole list of falsehood, the reader should possess a global, if not complete, overview of the domain being targeted by the article, including most, if not all, its pitfalls, edges-cases and inconsistencies.

In the worst case, these articles might provoke an emotional reaction and cause flipping table. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Libraries

When possible, we provide a list of programming libraries or modules that may solve, or try to, the complexities and idiosyncrasies pointed by the falsehood articles above.

So we can put back tables in place. ┬─┬ ノ( ゜-゜ノ)

Data Structures

Data models and structures generic enough to cover and address most of the falsehoods are also welcome in this page.

License

Content of this repository is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 license.

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