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Comment by EMM_386 | Hacker News Reader

Well, as a senior software engineer and commercial pilot ... I am left confused.

Not all the things in the list, because I am aware of those. I might have missed the runway numbers changing based on shifting magnetic field of the earth, but that's a thing too. Runway 22? That's now Runway 21.

But why programmers specifically would believe this, as opposed to ... any other profession that is not aviation?

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There is a genre of articles that list similar non-intuitive facts about various domains (people's names, music, etc). The relation to programmers is that they are often creating software systems where some of these facts come into play, e.g., by using some values as primary keys, foreign keys, etc.

Yeah but most of those are about generic things that random programmers will likely encounter and might think they understand but actually don't. That's what makes those lists interesting.

The article isn't meant to imply that only programmers would believe these. It's just a little niche of 'Falsehoods that Programmers believe about XYZ' sort of articles that became popular because programmers tend to write software that ends up interacting with real world systems that have edge cases many programmers would not consider if they're not dealing with the problem space for a while.

Programmers learning that education is a thing

The author is a developer at FlightAware, theyre just showcasing the difficulty of writing software for aviation

> But why programmers specifically would believe this, as opposed to ... any other profession that is not aviation?

I don't read it as programmers specifically believing that, is that they're specifically treating these things as invariants in their projects.

Programmers are rarely genuine experts in the domain, we depend on the subject matter experts to define the parameters for the system under construction. Some SMEs have deep knowledge and would know these, but many, while very knowledgeable, have not encountered the specific edge cases nor heard about them. As a result, the design incorporates these inaccurate assumptions, and for a long time it works fine. Until it doesn't. And by the way this is why waterfall and big design up front fails as a development methodology.

tl;dr: you can't know absolutely everything ahead of time.

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