Three Great Lies

[Campbell Ritchie]

We have doubtless all been told one of the Three Great Lies:-

1: Somebody's on their way to help you already.

2: The cheque's in the post.

3: The equals method is easy to write.

Am I quite right about No 3? Does anybody know the correct version for No 3?

[Liutauras Vilda]

Campbell Ritchie wrote:Am I quite right about No 3?

No!

Everybody on this planet knows, that if there is something easy about those (not this), then: "easy to override equals() AND hashcode()".

In nowadays, there's another one lie we hear often enough: "will fix indentation later"

[Tim Cooke]

Or more generally "Will fix <insert short cut> later", when we all know that later means never.

[Tim Holloway]

Four Great Lies:

4. It's simple! All You Have To Do Is...

[Tim Cooke]

Oh that well known falseness: Small matter of programming

[Tim Holloway]

Actually, SMOP is a subset of AYHTDI.

AYHTDI is also heard when servers need upgrading, cables need to be run, and software needs to be updated or replaced. In other words, virtually any IT work.

It's close relative is "Oh, I see you've got the sample webpages to display. You can have the rest of the system done and in production by Thursday, right?"

And its deadly evil twin, thoughtlessly uttered by the developers themselves: "All I Have To Do Is..."

[Tim Cooke]

One of my project managers has a bad habit of saying things like "It shouldn't take long" or "It should just be a case of doing...". Worse is when I overhear those words being delivered to our product stakeholders before I've even had a chance to evaluate the problem.

In a previous company our development team manager and lead engineer had a rather heated disagreement with some project managers about a work estimate he'd provided because they believed the Proof of Concept system written by another team would account for 80% of the final production ready product. There was profuse objection when told the PoC worked for a narrow set of use cases but the quality was such that none of it could be used in production. Egos were bruised and strops were had. Bad times.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Liutauras Vilda wrote:. . . "will fix indentation later"

I thought that was a username; everybody on BJ has that username.

[Tim Cooke]

"Please just give me the code for my assignment due in 3 hours time. I'll learn how it works later."

Right. Sure you will.

[Bear Bibeault]

They all come under the single great lie:

Trust me!

[Tim Cooke]

Just right Bear. Like a codebase with no tests.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Tim Cooke wrote:. . . no tests.

How peculiar; everybody on BJ has that username, too.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

But it's urgent!

[Piet Souris]

You have three great lies, three damned great lies and you have statistics.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Piet Souris wrote:. .  . and you have statistics.

Surely that means three statistics.