Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Delk 1030 days ago
To be fair, most of the stuff in "falsehoods programmers believe about $concept" lists are really falsehoods almost everyone believes. Software is just one of the places where the limits of those implicit beliefs might actually become apparent.

Most people never need to think about the details of how names might work in a different culture across the world, let alone work that into any kind of a rule-based mechanism or a rigid information model. If some random person working at a construction site in Europe or the US has no idea that first names and last names aren't a universal thing, that has exactly zero direct effect on anything. In most cases that's probably even true of lawyers or other high-level white collar work.

I'm actually inclined to believe lots of programmers know more about e.g. time [1] than a non-programmer Joe Random does on average, exactly because software developers may actually end up coming across at least some of those issues.

[1] e.g. https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...