Heresies

Heresies are uncomfortable truths. For falsehoods, see sophistries.

• Case insensitive filesystems are a mistake. Case sensitive filesystems are a mistake. Filesystems should have non-deterministic handling of case-sensitivity.
• MM/DD/YYYY is a reasonable human readable date format.
• Strongly typed/weakly typed are meaningful terms.
• Function scope is neither better nor worse than block scope.
• Meaningful variable names are a work-around for the damage of large methods and imperative programming.
• Every language grows until it supports multiple inheritance—whether it uses the term or not.
• An advantage of composition over inheritance is that composition allows multiple inheritance without language support.
• "Dumb users" clicking on things they "shouldn't" are the only way we'll get the secure systems we deserve. Heighten the contradictions!
• Extensibility is a good excuse for not implementing necessary functionality.
• 30C + 10C = 313.15C.
• It's hard to state the difference between asking individual developers to show business impact and "promotion driven development".
• Implicit is better than explicit
• Explicit is better than implicit.
• The average person talking online would be significantly better informed if they just read wikipedia.
• The web is a platform for delivering applications that accidentally supports hypertext documents.
• Something "unsustainable" will typically be sustained much longer than you can imagine.