Murphy’s law in theory and practice

As Mark Sackler wrote on his Millennium Conjectures web log, Murphy’s Law is the only law that works better in practice than it does in theory.

Murphy’s laws of programming

1.  Any given program, when running, is obsolete.

2.  If a program is useless, it will have to be documented.

3.  If a program is useful, it will have to be documented.

4.  Any program will expand to fill available memory.

5.  The value of a program is proportional to the weight of its output.

6.  Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capacity of a programmer to maintain it.

7.  Make it possible for programmers to write in English, and you will find out that programmers cannot write in English.

Finagle’s Laws of Information

1.  The information you have is not what you want.
2.  The information you want is not what you need.
3.  The information you need is not what you can obtain.
4.  The information you can obtain costs more than you want to pay.

Muphry’s Law

If you set yourself up as an authority on grammar, spelling or usage, or if you criticize editing or proofreading, there will be a mistake of some kind in what you have written.