dwmkerr / hacker-laws

💻📖 Laws, Theories, Principles and Patterns that developers will find useful. #hackerlaws
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Add Handicap principle #293

Open AnimMouse opened 4 years ago

AnimMouse commented 4 years ago

Handicap principle denotes that the more costly it is to make a signal, and the more costly it is to be caught if that signal is dishonest, the more reliable that signal appears.

See also: Status symbol, Not-invented-here syndrome, Endowment effect, Eating your own dog food

Examples:

When people prefer to use a program that is written in C than programs that are written on Python.

When people prefer to use CLI instead of GUI.

When people prefer to use Linux instead of Windows.

When people prefer to use Arch Linux instead of Ubuntu.

When people prefer to compile programs than to download its precompiled binaries.

When people prefer to roll their own crypto than to use already established crypto.

When people prefer to make their own program than to use off the shelves programs.

When people prefer not to use abstractions.

btw I use arch

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle

(Disclaimer: assuming difficulty is absolute, not relative)

SuperSandro2000 commented 4 years ago

When people prefer to use Linux instead of Windows.

The only example which is not generally true here. If I just setup WSL on Windows I can just use Linux.

dwmkerr commented 4 years ago

Really interesting addition, will definitely bring it in!

troyane commented 3 years ago

@AnimMouse I have never heard of "handicap principle" but this is really interesting one. It brings Veblen effect as first association (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good) and an obesity as a sign of ability to procure or afford plenty of food.

I can hardly agree with your examples. Most are just examples of another principles: mostly KISS + Occam's razor.

Even with given assumption that difficulty is absolute and not relative these examples could rise a holy-war.