Two Hard Things

14 July 2009

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

-- Phil Karlton

Long a favorite saying of mine, one for which I couldn't find a satisfactory URL.

Like many good phrases, it's had a host of riffs on it. A couple of them I feel are worth adding to the page

The first place anyone found it on the internet was in Tim Bray's blog. Tim said that he first heard it around 1996-7

Revisions

2009-07-14: original post

2010-12-21: added off-by-one variation (unattributed)

2015-08-14: added distributed tweet

2017-03-30: added proper tweet for off-by-one and mention of Tim Bray's source

2017-12-22: added the Phillip Scott Bowden tweet

2021-05-24: added Nat Pryce tweet

Acknowledgements

Leon Bambrick let me know about better sources.