Hofstadter's Law
Ever come across: Hofstadter's Law ?
I was reading about it in The Guardian, and quite liked it.
It is a self-referencing time-related adage, coined by Douglas Hofstadter strangely enough, and states:
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account.
Hofstadter's Law is apparently a statement of the difficulty of accurately estimating the amount of time it will take to complete tasks of any substantial complexity. Hofstadter's Law is infinitely recursive in nature (i.e., it calls itself by reference), as it has no terminal condition or case. That is, even after one has taken Hofstadter's Law into account, by Hofstadter's Law one must still apply Hofstadter's Law, and so on.
I was reading about it in The Guardian, and quite liked it.
It is a self-referencing time-related adage, coined by Douglas Hofstadter strangely enough, and states:
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account.
Hofstadter's Law is apparently a statement of the difficulty of accurately estimating the amount of time it will take to complete tasks of any substantial complexity. Hofstadter's Law is infinitely recursive in nature (i.e., it calls itself by reference), as it has no terminal condition or case. That is, even after one has taken Hofstadter's Law into account, by Hofstadter's Law one must still apply Hofstadter's Law, and so on.
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