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.
To be wrong, first you need to take a falsifiable position :-)
Well, that's the issue in dispute here. It's a complex problem and requires analysis too serious for a few LW comments, but I don't think you can simply handwave it away. In the UK in particular the recent focus on criminalizing certain kinds of speech is quite troubling.
I don't know what you mean, nor do I care. The UK has always criminalized some kinds of speech and does not try to pretend otherwise.
(The USA has also always criminalized some kinds of speech. But I think this is because the Supreme Court lacked the real power to remove obscenity laws until after such laws had become "precedent".)