? Awesome Falsehood

A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe in.

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.

Contents

• Meta
• Arts
• Business
• Dates and Time
• Education
• Emails
• Geography
• Human Identity
• Internationalization
• Management
• Multimedia
• Networks
• Phone Numbers
• Postal Addresses
• Science
• Society
• Software Engineering
• Typography

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.
• Falsehoods About Art - Common
  misconceptions about art.

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 Economics - Economics
  are not simple or rational.
• Falsehoods About Cars - Even
  something as common as defining a car is full of pitfalls.
• 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.
• The Problem with Time & Timezones - A
  video about why you should never, ever deal with timezones if you can help it.
• $26,000 Overcollection by Labor Department - The
  consequence of wrong calendar accounting.
• ISO-8601, YYYY, yyyy, and why your year may be wrong - String
  formatting of date is hard.
• UTC is Enough for everyone, right? - There
  are edge cases about dates and time (specifically UTC) that you probably
  haven't thought of.
• Storing UTC is not a silver bullet - "Just
  store dates in UTC" is not always the right approach.
• Falsehoods about Unix Time - Mind
  the leap second!
• Why is subtracting these two times (in 1927) giving a strange result? - Infamous
  Stack Overflow answer about both complicated historical timezones, and how
  historical dates can be re-interpreted by newer versions of software.

Education

• Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating - A
  list of things (not only) computer science students tend to erroneously and at
  times surprisingly believe even though they (probably) should know better.
• Postdoc myths - Lots of things are said, written and believed about postdoctoral researchers that are simply not true..

Emails

• I Knew How to Validate an Email Address Until I Read the RFC - Provides
  intricate examples that are unsuspected valid email addresses according the
  RFC-822.
• So you think you can validate email addresses (FOSDEM 2018) - Presentation
  of edge-case email addresses and why you should not use regex to parse them.

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 Names – With Examples - A
  revisited version of the article above, this time with detailed explanations.
• Falsehoods About Gender: #1 & #2 - 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.
• My name causes an issue with any booking! - Old
  airline reservation systems considers the MR suffix as Mister and drops it.
• HL7 v3 RIM - A
  flexible data model for representing human names.
• Apple iOS NSPersonNameComponentsFormatter - Localized
  representations of the components of a person's name.
• Falsehoods About Me - Issues at
  the intersection of names and gender and internationalization.

Internationalization

On character encoding, string formatting, unicode and internationalization.

• Falsehoods About Language - Translating
  a software from English is not as straightforward as it seems to be.
• Internationalis(z)ing Code - A
  video about things you need to keep in mind when internationalizing your
  code.
• Minimum to Know About Unicode and Character Sets - A
  good introduction to unicode, its historical context and origins, followed by
  an overview of its inner working.
• Awesome Unicode - A curated list
  of delightful Unicode tidbits, packages and resources.
• Dark corners of Unicode - Unicode
  is extensive, here be dragons.
• Let's Stop Ascribing Meaning to Code Points - Dives
  deeper in Unicode and dispels myths about code points.
• Breaking Our Latin-1 Assumptions - Most
  programmers spend so much time with Latin-1 they forgets about other's scripts
  quirks.
• Ode to a shipping label - Character
  encoding is hard, more so when each broken layer of data input adds its own
  spice.
• i18n Testing Data - Compilation of
  real-word international and diverse name data for unit testing and QA.
• Big List of Naughty Strings - A
  huge corpus of strings which have a high probability of causing issues when
  used as user-input data. A must have set of practical edge-cases to test your
  software against.

Management

• Falsehoods About Job Applicants - Assumptions
  about job applicants and their job histories aren't necessarily true.

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.
• There's more than one way to write an IP address - Some
  parts of the address are optional, mind the decimal and octal notations,
  and don't forget IPv6 either.
• hostname-validate - An
  attempt to validate hostnames in Python.

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.
• Falsehoods About Residence - It's
  not only about the address itself, but the relationship between a person and its residence.
• Letter Delivered Despite No Name, No Address - Ultimate
  falsehood about postal addresses: you do not need one.
• The Bear with Its Own ZIP Code - Smokey
  Bear has his own ZIP Code (20252) because he gets so much mail.
• Regex and Postal Addresses - Why
  regular expressions and street addresses do not mix.
• 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.
• address - Go library to validate
  and format addresses using Google's dataset.

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.
• Falsehoods About Testing - An
  attempt to establish a list of falsehoods about testing.
• Popular misconceptions about mtime - Part
  of a post on why file's mtime comparison could be considered harmful.
• Falsehoods About Pagination - Why
  your pagination algorithm is giving someone (possibly you) a headache.
• Rules for Autocomplete - Not
  falsehoods per-se, but still a great list of good practices to implement
  autocompletion.
• 9999999999999999.0 - 9999999999999998.0 - A
  kind of falsehood on numbers, and floats vs decimals.
• Falsehoods About Search - Why
  search (including analysis, tokenization, highlighting) is deceptively complex.
• Hi! My name is… - This talk
  could have been named "falsehoods about usernames (and other identifiers)".
• Myths about /dev/urandom - There
  are a few things about /dev/urandom and /dev/random that are repeated again and
  again. Still they are false.
• Myths about CPU Caches - Misconceptions
  about caches often lead to false assertions, especially when it comes to
  concurrency and race conditions.

Typography

• Falsehoods About Fonts - Assumptions
  about typography on the web and in desktop applications.
• Truths programmers should know about case - A
  complete reverse of the falsehoods format, on the topic of case (as in uppercase
  and lowercase text).

Contributing

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

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.

The header image is based on a modified
photo taken in February 2010 by Iza Bella,
distributed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0 UK
license.

[1]: Notebooks, 1914-1916, page 14e (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1961). [↑]