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2014-12-31

Murphy's Law

Murphy's Law is often stated like this:

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

But this is misleading because it sounds like it's a philosophy about the imperfection of the world, or mortality, or entropy, or fate. As if Murphy was just a layman who liked to make smartass remarks about how God is out to get you. This interpretation is not very useful.

Really, Murphy was some kind of engineer:

If you make it possible for someone to do something wrong, he will.

Now it's a useful maxim, especially if you're a programmer, web designer, game developer, or anyone else who is creating something other people will have to work with. Remember the story about the guy who somehow crammed all of his floppy disks into the drive at the same time? Murphy's Law was not being followed earnestly enough to account for that guy. The phrase "defensive driving" has the same meaning. It seems obvious when you notice you're only allowed to plug something in the right way or when you notice the simplicity of the iPhone GUI, yet maybe you haven't been thinking about this enough. Is your website broken? Are you broken?

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