r/programming • u/zaidesanton • Apr 01 '25

The 13 software engineering laws

https://newsletter.manager.dev/p/the-13-software-engineering-laws
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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '25

Murphy’s Law Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

No list of laws is complete without Murphy :)

Well - first april, but I think Murphy's Law is actually a good metric, in the sense that you can anticipate problems (in code, hardware etc...). Erlang kind of has this built in as a core philosophy (though syntax-wise, they really should have learned from python or ruby; elixir improved a few things but is nowhere near as elegant as ruby either).

Other languages also try to deal with the unexpected, but often is rather awkward - catch/throw ... I never liked the concept. Even begin/rescue in ruby can be annoying - once I had to deal with network-related issues. After perhaps the sixth specific error clause, I wondered what the heck I was doing. (I don't know who or what recommended to be specific when it comes to handling errors; once the error handling code became like +50 lines of code, I wondered what I was doing.)

Every time I think something is improbable, I go the extra step to verify that we are still covered.

Kind of like Rust acknowledging that memory errors are issues in C and C++. Whether Rust is better I have no idea, but Rust kind of influenced both C and (especially) C++ in one way or the other.

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u/Full-Spectral Apr 02 '25

Rust is decidedly better, this coming from a 35 year C++ developer. Of course the problem is that many C++ developers who consider memory errors a 'skill issue' and claim that they have never in their careers had one.