😱 Awesome Falsehood

A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe in.

The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein^[1]

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

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 international.
Falsehoods About Economics - Economics are not simple or rational.
Falsehoods About Cars - Even something as common as defining a car is full of pitfalls.
Decimal Point Error in Etsy's Accounting System - The importance of types in accounting software: missing the decimal point ends up with 100x over-charges.
Characters < and > in company names lead to XSS attacks - Because UK allows companies to be registered with special characters, a hacker leveraged them to register \"><SCRIPT SRC=MJT.XSS.HT></SCRIPT> LTD, but also ; DROP TABLE "COMPANIES";-- LTD, BETTS &AMP; TWINE LTD and SAFDASD & SFSAF \' SFDAASF\" LTD.
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.
Falsehoods programmers believe about time zones - Has some nice points regarding the edge-cases of DST transitions.
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.
Critical and Significant Dates - From Y2K to the overflow of 32-bit seconds from unix epoch, a list of special date to watch for depending on the system.

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.
I Hate Coordinate Systems - A guide for geospatial practitionners oin diagnosing and fixing common issues with coordinate systems.
Top 5 most insane kanji place names in Japan - “There's one special group of kanji that’s hard even for Japanese people to read: place names.”

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.
Parsing the Infamous Japanese Postal CSV - “I saw many horrors, but I've never seen this particular formatting choice anywhere else.”
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.
Floating Point Math - "Your language isn't broken, it's doing floating point math. (…) This is why, more often than not, 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3."
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.
The Hidden Complexity of Downloading Favicons, Told in 15+ Edge Cases - Downloading that little icon you see in you browser tabs should be a simple exercise. It turned out to be a lot more complicated than you think. Be vigilant that you are not shaving a Yak.
Norway is not False - Norway's ISO country code is also valid YAML for False.

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.

Footnotes

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). [↑]

nsnguyen/awesome-falsehood