LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles
If you only do this you are going to fail. This is why Aristotle got physics so badly wrong, right? Reasoning has to be a cyclical process of compressing complex realities into sets of simple principles and only then are you licensed to decompress those principles into making statements about reality.
Addressing common misconceptions is worthwhile, and lists are a good way to do it. You can find similar lists in the academic literature for many different subjects, e.g., here's an article about common misconceptions in thermodynamics. I've also mentioned math books listing counterexamples before. Many counterexamples address common misconceptions.
I like to create Anki cards for common misconceptions, to make sure I don't makes these mistakes myself. One issue with this is whether correcting specific cases causes my brain to recognize a more general case....
So while many of these false beliefs are worth noting, it's worth thinking why programmers make these mistakes in practice. While it might be the case that names can include numbers, it's probably also going to be the case that the majority of numbers get into names via user error. Depending on the purpose of your database, it might be more valuable to avoid user error, than avoid a minority of users being excluded.
The reason I mention this is a lot of things in life are a study in trade offs. Quantum mechanics isn't very good at describing how big things work, and classical mechanics isn't very good at describing how small things work.
Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up).
A lot of programmers believe they can parse HTML with regular expressions.
From Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names:
anything someone tells you is their name is — by definition — an appropriate identifier for them.
There should be a list of false things people coming from common law jurisdictions believe about how choice of identity works on the rest of the globe.
Sometimes a user puts something in a "name" field that they do not actually intend to be used to identify themselves.
They may be trying to get that string displayed to other users in a highlighted fashion. If someone puts "Wal-Mart Sucks" in the name field on a blog comment, it isn't because they seriously want to be identified by the surname of Sucks. They're just saying that Wal-Mart sucks, in a dramatic way.
They may be trying to break the system in one way or another. If someone puts their name as "Robert'; drop table students; --" then depending on the social and technical context they might be giving themselves a clever alias; or they might be trying to attack the database.
I think it's worth noting that, yes, if you want your database of names/addresses/times/etc. to be fully robust, you need to essentially represent these items as unconstrained strings of arbitrary length (including zero).
However, in practice, most likely you're not building a fully robust database. For example, you are not solving the problem of, "how can I fully represent all of the marvelous variety of human names and addresses ?", but rather, "how can I maximize the changes that the packages my company is shipping to customers will actual...
Also, there is a place where the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
(Gur fha evfrf orpnhfr bs gur Rnegu'f ebgngvba, ohg rira va gur nofrapr bs gur Rnegu'f ebgngvba vg jbhyq evfr naq frg bapr n lrne orpnhfr bs ubj gur Rnegu'f nkvf cbvagf. Vs lbh ner pybfr rabhtu gb gur Abegu Cbyr, gur ebgngvba unf artyvtvoyr pbagevohgvba gb gur fha'f evfvat naq frggvat naq gur fha evfrf naq frgf cerggl zhpu bayl orpnhfr bs gur nkvf. Tb gb gur Abegu Cbyr, frr jurer gur fha evfrf, naq tb njnl sebz gur cbyr n fubeg qvfgnapr va n qverpgvba fhpu gung guvf cbvag vf gb gur jrfg.)
A problem of believing something wrong could also be a problem of classification or problem of language. There is so much lost in translation and as far as a programmer is concerned they deal with a very formal language. So they are not as good at informal languages and nuances.
I'm not a programmer, so my view may be a little bit skewed.. but this seems like a list of things that may or may not be correct (and I'd like to put things in a continuum, or percentages, or some other more practically observable other than a list) but it doesn't really get any further than that. How substantial many of the claims are?
I honestly doubt "programmers" get all these wrong. I'm not going to link to a post (I've seen some people replying with a post as if it's a substitute for actually saying what's wrong) or even say that "prog...
Could you turn the tracking links into direct ones?
Both in this sense and in this as well.
OK, so the first one shows that if you run a business you can get into trouble for discriminating against certain traditionally-discriminated-against groups. And the second shows that in some parts of the business world, giving money to an anti-same-sex-marriage campaign can disqualify you from the role of CEO. I don't think these examples are good support for worrying about 'the transformation of "politeness and decency" into enforced mandatory attitudes', and I'll (too verbosely, sorry) explain why.
The first of these (which, unlike the other, involves actual legal mandatoriness) seems to me distinctly less dramatic than t.t.o.p.a.d.i.e.m.a., but I can see how you could describe it that way. But I can't help suspecting that what you disapprove of here may not be only enforced politeness-and-decency. Imagine a similar case where, instead of refusing to serve a same-sex couple, the business refused to serve a mixed-race couple. This would be illegal in the same way and would meet with the same sanction; and, I suggest, this would be equally a matter of legally enforced politeness-and-decency.
How would you feel about that case? Here's how I would feel about it, which not coincidentally is roughly how I feel about the same-sex case too. Freedom is important and, were it not for the consequences for others, I would like businesses to be free to operate however they want. However, there are consequences for others, which is why (to take a much less controversial example) in many jurisdictions a shop cannot legally sell what it claims are bread rolls suitable for human consumption that are actually full of metal shavings and strychnine. Some groups of people -- e.g., black people, women, gay people -- have traditionally been the object of suspicion and hatred and discrimination, and for each of these groups there are plenty of people who would love to discriminate against them. If such discrimination were legal, then people belonging to these groups might find themselves at a substantial systematic disadvantage; it's not like 5% of businesses would say "no blacks" and another 5% "no whites", 5% "no gay people" and 5% "no straight people"; the discriminations correlate. I think we are all better off if these groups are not systematically disadvantaged, and I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of freedom-to-discriminate for that. This argument works only in so far as there's enough prejudice (at least in some places; it tends to be localized) that the groups in question really do suffer substantial systematic harm. I think there still is, against all the traditionally-disfavoured groups, but maybe in 30 years that will change and we can make some of them not be protected classes any more.
If you feel that way about (say) black people (or, relatedly, mixed-race couples) but not about (say) gay people (or, relatedly, same-sex couples) then I think our disagreement is not about politeness and decency being socially mandatory, it's about whether there's more discrimination against one group than another or whether one group's interests matter more than another's.
The second example (Brendan Eich) concerns social rather than legal mandatoriness, and I think this is something that varies considerably between different bits of society. E.g., the owners of Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby have espoused attitudes exactly opposite to the ones you say are becoming mandatory and they are at no risk of being ousted for them. So I'm not sure that "enforced mandatory attitudes" is a good description; what's happening is that Mozilla's employees and most vocal advocates are a rather atypical segment of the population, and there are things they disapprove of more strongly than the population at large. And that companies are generally really keen for their CEOs not to be disapproved of by the people they need to be on their side. I bet there are businesses (ones serving very socially-conservative markets) in which an openly gay person would be at a big disadvantage if they wanted to be CEO.
(I'd guess that the Eich case is highly visible because it's atypical, in that they actually got as far as appointing him. I would hazard a guess that openly gay people, and major donors to anti-same-sex-marriage campaigns, are both underrepresented among CEOs, but that there's little outrage about this because those people are just quietly less likely to be appointed. There are relatively few black or female CEOs, too, and while some people are upset about this it isn't a cause celebre in the way the Eich case is.)
I don't think these examples are good support
They are not support, the are examples. I am not trying to persuade you to start worrying, I'm explaining my position.
what you disapprove of here may not be only enforced politeness-and-decency
Well, yes, of course. I've been trying to generalize the issue out of the intently-peering-at-the-genitals niche. Yes, I would feel similarly about a mixed-race couple.
If such discrimination were legal, then people belonging to these groups might find themselves at a substantial systematic disadvantage;
I think ...
There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.