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Hyrum's Law


Put succinctly, the observation is this: With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody. Over the past couple years of doing low-level infrastructure migrations in one of the most complex software systems on the planet, I’ve made some observations about the differences between an interface and its implementations.

Over the past couple years of doing low-level infrastructure migrations in one of the most complex software systems on the planet, I’ve made some observations about the differences between an interface and its implementations. In practice, this theory breaks down as the use of a system grows and its users start to rely upon implementation details intentionally exposed through the interface, or which they divine through regular use. I work on large-scale code change tooling and infrastructure, and spent several years improving Google's core C++ libraries.

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