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

A curated Awesome list of falsehoods programmers believe in. A falsehood is an idea that you initially believed was true, but in reality, it is proven to be false.

E.g. of an idea: valid email address exactly has one @ character. So, you will use this rule to implement your email-field validation logic. Right? Wrong! The reality is: emails can have multiple @ chars. Therefore your implementation should allow this. The initial idea is a falsehood you believed in.

The falsehood articles listed below will have a comprehensive list of those false-beliefs that you should be aware of, to help you become a better programmer.

Meta

Arts

Business

Cryptocurrency

Dates and Time

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

Geography

Human Identity

Internationalization

On character encoding, string formatting, unicode and internationalization.

Management

Multimedia

Networks

Phone Numbers

Postal Addresses

Science

Society

Software Engineering

Transportation

Typography

Video Games

  • The Door Problem - All the things you have not considered implementing for your doors in games.

Web

Contributing

Your contributions are always welcome! Please take a look at the contribution guidelines first.

Footnotes

This list gathered some popularity in social medias over the past few years. See it being discussed and mentioned elsewhere.

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 (Liveright, 2022) - source: page 14e. [↑]