Hyrum's Law
Hyrum's Law is a Software Engineering observation that states:
With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.[1]
Origin[edit]
Hyrum's Law was stated by Hyrum Wright while he was working at Google[2]. Hyrum originally called it "The Law of Implicit Dependencies" but Titus Winters coined it "Hyrum's Law".
Examples[edit]
A hash table has no guarantee about ordering, but a deterministic compiler might return the same ordering while iterating over the members (even across multiple versions of the same compiler). This might cause a user of that data structure to rely on the ordering of that structure, despite there being no contract guaranteeing it will remain the same.
References[edit]
- ↑ https://www.hyrumslaw.com
- ↑ Winters, Titus; Tom, Manshreck; Wright, Hyrum. Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time. O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. 8. Search this book on
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