Month: August 2019

Postel’s Law is not a normal “law” in that it’s not an observation of behavior nor an inevitability of systems. Rather, Postel’s Law is an eponymous renaming of the Robustness Principle, a prescription for how to design software to follow a standard when it has to communicate with other software following the same standard: “Be…

A little late for the start of August for work reasons, but here’s the first Eponymy in August for 2019. Today’s Eponymy is the guillotine. The guillotine is a device for cleanly and reliably committing executions by beheading. A large, slightly angled blade on a frame of vertical rails is hoisted via a rope, the…