Murphy’s Laws For Programmers

Posted on March 1st, 2008

1. Anytime things appear to be going well, you have overlooked something.
2. If it looks easy, it’s tough. If it looks tough, it’s damn near impossible.
3. You always find any bug in the last place you look.
4. Anything can be made to work if you fiddle with it long enough.

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5. If you do not understand a particular word in a piece of technical writing, ignore it. The piece will make perfect sense without it.
6. What you don’t do is always more important than what you do do. No matter how much you do, you’ll never do enough.
7. Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that there is nothing important to do.
8. Always leave room in source code to add an explanation if it doesn’t work out.
9. Nothing is impossible for a man who doesn’t have to do it himself.
10. If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then the first woodpecker than came along would destroy civilization.
11. Any cool program always requires more memory than you have. When you finally buy enough memory, you will not have enough disk space
12. If a program actually fits in memory and has enough disk space, it is guaranteed to crash. If such a program has not crashed yet, it is waiting for a critical moment before it crashes.
13. A working program is one that has only unobserved bugs.
14. “The hard you try to do something *new*, the sooner you find out that somebody has already done it.”
15. No matter how good of a deal you get on computer components, the price will always drop immediately after the purchase.
16. Software bugs are impossible to detect by anybody except the end user.
17. No matter how hard you work, the boss will only appear when you access the internet.
18. The hard drive on your computer will only crash when it contains vital information that has not been backed up.
19. Each computer code has five bugs, and tis number does not depend on how many bugs have been already found (it is conservative).
20. The number of bugs always exceeds the number of lines found in a program.
21. The most ominous words for those using computers: “Daddy, what does ‘Now formatting Drive C mean’?”
22. An expert is someone brought in at the last minute to share the blame.
23. For any given software, the moment you manage to master it, a new version appears. The new version always manages to change the one feature you need most.
24. Whenever you need a crucial file from the server, the network will be down.
25. A patch is a piece of software which replaces old bugs with new bugs.
26. Failure is not an option, it’s included with the software.
27. It’s not a bug, it’s an undocumented feature.
28. Bugs mysteriously appear when you say, “Watch this!”. The probability of bugs appearing is directly proportional to the number and importance of people watching.
29. The only program that runs perfectly every time, is a virus.
30. If it works, it’s production. If it doesn’t, it’s a test.
31. Computers let you waste time efficiently
32. If you make the letters in your Word document bigger and then you print it out, you’ll have everything on the first page and only one line on the second.
33. After a software is released, the first bug found will be by a person who normally does not use that portion of the program but was wondering why he can’t do something he normally would not do.
34. The troubleshooting guide contains the answer to every problem except yours.
35. No matter what problem you have with your computer – Its Always Microsoft’s fault. If its not their fault – Blame them anyway
36. Walking on water and developing software to specification are easy as long as both are frozen.
37. The smaller the size of your email account, the more junk mail you will get
38. When designing a program to handle all possible dumb errors, nature creates a dumber user.
39. Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. No matter how many resources you have, it is never enough.
40. There is always one more bug.

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