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> this is what naming things refers to in Phil Karlton's quote "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things," not to the literal naming of variables in computer programs

That is mighty interesting. Do you happen to have a source for this? It's the first time I've heard it being put in this particular way.



https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/19836/has-phil-...

Several references to the quote "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things" can be found, such as Martin Fowler's blog and others.

I'm unable to find the source of this quote, has he ever said it?

- As his only son, and colleague with him at Netscape from 95-97, I can attest that my dad did indeed throw that quote around, on more than one occasion. I'm fairly confident that he originated it (he was fond of coming up with clever quippets), though I haven't been able to figure out how it disseminated so widely over the past couple of decades. I'll keep looking around in old web archives and mails to see if I can dig something up.


The version I've heard is "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors".


There are only two hard things in Computer Science:

0. cache invalidation

1. naming things

47. asynchronous callbacks

2. off by one errors


Zero-based indexing.




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