Eponymous laws are bits of joking wisdom named after someone. Here are my favorites related to technology:
- Amara’s law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
- Atwood’s law: Any software that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript.
- Brooks’s law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
- Conway’s law: Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.
- Cunningham’s law: The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.
- Gall’s law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.”
- Godwin’s law: an adage in Internet culture: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
- Gustafson’s law: (also known as Gustafson–Barsis’s law) in computer engineering: any sufficiently large problem can be efficiently parallelized.
- Kerckhoffs’s principle of secure cryptography: A cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is public.
- Koomey’s law: the energy of computation is halved every year and a half.
- Kranzberg’s laws of technology: The first law states that technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
- Maes–Garreau law: most favorable predictions about future technology will fall around latest possible date they can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making the prediction.
- Metcalfe’s law in communications and network theory: the value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.
- Mooers’s law: “An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.”
- Moore’s law: is an empirical observation stating that the complexity of integrated circuits doubles every 24 months.
- Nielsen’s law: A high-end user’s internet connection speed grows by 50% per year.
- Postel’s law: Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.
- Putt’s law: Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.
- Putt’s corollary: Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion.
- Reed’s law: the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.
- Schneier’s law: “Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.”
- Sowa’s law of standards: “Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X.”[11]
- Tesler’s law of conservation of complexity: states that every application has an inherent amount of complexity that cannot be removed or hidden.
- Wirth’s law: Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster.
- Zawinski’s law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot expand are replaced by ones which can.
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