TITLE: "Good Character" as an Instance of Postel's Law
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 22, 2015  2:57 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Mike Feathers draws an analogy I'd never thought of before in
<A HREF="https://michaelfeathers.silvrback.com/the-universality-of-postel-s-law">
   The Universality of Postel's Law</A>:
what we think of as "good character" can be thought of as an
application of
<A HREF="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle">
   Postel's Law</A>
to ordinary human relations.

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Societies often have the notion of 'good character'.
 We can attempt all sorts of definitions but at its
 core, isn't good character just having tolerance for
 the foibles of others and being a person people can
 count on?  Accepting wider variation at input and
 producing less variation at output?  In systems
 terms that puts more work on the people who have
 that quality -- they have to have enough control to
 avoid 'going off' on people when others 'go off on
 them', but they get the benefit of being someone
 people want to connect with.  I argue that those
 same dynamics occur in physical systems and software
 systems that have the Postel property.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

These days, most people talk about Postel's Law as a social
law, and criticisms of it even in software design refer to it
as creating moral hazards for designers.  But Postel coined
this "principle of robustness" as a way to talk about
implementing TCP, and most references I see to it now relate
to HTML and web browsers.  I think it's pretty cool when a
software design principle applies more broadly in the design
world, or can even be useful for understanding human behavior
far removed from computing.  That's the sign of a valuable
pattern -- or anti-pattern.
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