Falsehoods programmers believe about names

People's names do not change

People’s names have an order to them

My system will never have to deal with names from China

I can safely assume that this dictionary of bad words contains no people’s names in it

People have names

Falsehoods programmers believe about time

The time zone in which a program has to run will never change

The system clock will never be set to a time that is in the distant past or the far future

One minute on the system clock has exactly the same duration as one minute on any other clock

A time stamp of sufficient precision can safely be considered unique

The duration of one minute on the system clock would never be more than an hour

More falsehoods programmers believe about time

The local time offset (from UTC) will not change during office hours.

My software is only used internally/locally, so I don’t have to worry about timezones

I can easily maintain a timezone list myself

Time passes at the same speed on top of a mountain and at the bottom of a valley