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Topic: Principle of least astonishment

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	Principle Of Least Astonishment
		The Principle of Least Astonishment states that the result of performing some operation should be obvious, consistent, and predictable, based upon the name of the operation and other clues.
		All of the major Smalltalk language bugs are violations of the principle of least astonishment.
		Now meditate on the fact that Smalltalk's violations of the principle of least astonishment are actually enumerable.
	c2.com /cgi/wiki?PrincipleOfLeastAstonishment (804 words)

	[idn] Least Astonishment (was: Re: canonicalization) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-07)
		The Principle (or Law) of Least Astonishment dictates that, if an action is taken, and there are choices about what outcome should result, the outcome should be chosen that is least astonishing to the typical user.
		Stated quite differently, if common sense (or even logic) is applied to a particular circumstance, the actual outcome should correspond closely to the prediction.
		Nonetheless it is very important, especially for the DNS where the users and arbiters (e.g., lawyers and politicians) legitimately believe that their interpretations of how names ought to behave are at least as important as narrow technical concerns.
	www.imc.org /idn/mail-archive/msg00888.html (138 words)

	least - Webled.com
		least cost routing is the technology which allows ]...
		[ so that his statement of least action in statics is equivalent to the ]...
		[ In 1746 Maupertuis formulated] the Principle of least Action, which is ]...
	www.webled.com /least.htm (267 words)

	Principle of least astonishment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The principle says that pressing Control-Q while recording a macro should not quit the program (which would surprise the user), but rather should record the keystroke.
		Principle of Least Astonishment at Portland Pattern Repository
		Law of Least Astonishment from The Tao of Programming by Geoffrey James
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment (185 words)

	BBC NEWS \| Technology \| Site finding system faces suspension
		The move was greeted with protests not least because people fighting spam like to use the domain checking system to check if the site where junk e-mail originated actually exists.
		The two principles in question are the Robustness Principle and the Principle of Least Astonishment.
		The Principle of Least Astonishment reads: A program should always respond in the way that is least likely to astonish the user.
	news.bbc.co.uk /1/low/technology/3129184.stm (464 words)

	UmmWikiSkin < Dungeon < TWiki (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-07)
		There are two things I find odd: The lack of underlines on links, and the fact that section headings look like links (which they aren't) when you roll over them with the mouse.
		Neither is crucial, but both violate the Principle of Least Astonishment for most web users.
		Another thing that violates the Principle of Least Astonishment is that visited links are no longer indicated in a different color in this web.
	csci.mrs.umn.edu /twiki/view/Dungeon/UmmWikiSkin (977 words)

	Verizon Business Venezuela (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-07)
		Dertouzos posits the value of directing much more effort on tools that are simple and intuitive to use - this suggests that the tasks these tools enable must be very well understood by the software developers.
		Indeed, one seeks to achieve the principle of least astonishment (my choice of emphasis, not Dertouzos' necessarily).
		That is to say that the software more or less does things automatically that do not surprise the users.
	www.verizonbusiness.com /ve/resources/cerfs_up/reviews/unfinished.xml (238 words)

	[No title]
		I am fond of work that involves the Principle of Least Astonishment in Astrophysics.
		Another hypothesis, that this paper addresses, is that these quasars are actually magnified without being multiply imaged, so the observed magnitude is larger than it should be, and thus their mass is overestimated.
		Given these two hypothesis, the Principle of Least Astonishment selects the latter.
	www.owlnet.rice.edu /~jeffreyh/LRP/intro.html (361 words)

	Let's Swing! : Weblog
		At least for me. And this is what I've found (and, as always, all feedback is welcome).
		Ruby's array API is all but "least astonishing" to a Java programmer.
		Note, as well, that the more an API follows the Minimum Surprise Principle the easier the API is to learn.
	blogs.sun.com /swinger/entry/simple_kisses_and_surprises (1296 words)

	L5r:Guide to writing better articles - L5r: Legend of the Five Rings - A Wikia wiki
		In shorter articles, if one subtopic has much more text than another subtopic, that may be an indication that that subtopic should have its own page, with only a summary presented on the main page.
		The L5R Wiki is open to all of the world, a diverse and multi-ethnic blend, to say the least.
		This is the principle that you should plan your pages and links so that everything appears reasonable and makes sense.
	l5r.wikia.com /wiki/L5r:Guide_to_writing_better_articles (3217 words)

	The Principle of Least Astonishment
		When computers are at their most usable, we don't even notice them; when they are at their least, they astonish us.
		Throughout the history of engineering, one usability principle seems to me to have risen high above all others.
		Web pages astonish users by hiding buttons, providing buttons that don't work, and redefining the basic visual cues that are supposed to allow users to navigate a page.
	www.plethora.net /~seebs/ops/ibm/cranky10.html (1393 words)

	Principle of Least Astonishment - Cre8asite Forums (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-07)
		Principle of Least Astonishment, A long lost lesson re-learned
		While talking to some of the testers of my new tool, I remembered a long-forgotten lesson in computer software design: The Principle of Least Astonishment.
		The idea is very simple: If the user interacts with software (including websites), the interaction should produce an expected result.
	www.cre8asiteforums.com /forums/index.php?showtopic=33937 (377 words)

	Ethical Software by Alex Bunardzic » Principle of Least Astonishment
		While teaching a recent worshop for Rails, I’ve introduced the Principle of Least Astonishment to the class.
		Also known as the Principle of Least Surprise, this principle caught my students by surprise.
		For some reason, my students found that to be counter-intuitive, and therefore quite astonishing.
	jooto.com /blog/index.php/2006/06/06/principle-of-least-astonishment (523 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-07)
		Even though they are shipping newer versions of Sendmail software that are not are not open by default, IBM intentionally discards the non-relay configuration file and ships a default sendmail.cf that makes the system an open relay.
		While we agree that users are responsible for the configurations of their systems, it is unfriendly to customers to ship software that, from the open source community is safe, but has been intentionally made unsafe from IBM.
		This violates the principle of least astonishment, and only adds to the user's workload.
	security.sdsc.edu /advisories/2003.05.13-AIX-sendmail.txt (438 words)

	David Handy's Radio Weblog (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-07)
		OpenCyc product manager John De Oliveira says the work Cycorp is doing is focused on furthering development of Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Semantic Web, a future incarnation of the Web in which content will be interpreted and manipulated by computers rather than simply read by humans.
		Posted at 6:23:12 PM IBM DeveloperWorks: The Principle of Least Astonishment.
		When users are astonished they usually assume that they have made a mistake; they are unlikely to realize that the page has astonished them.
	radio.weblogs.com /0114589/weblog/2001/09/01.html (129 words)

	Programming Rules (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-07)
		The system should always respond in a manner which causes the "least astonishment" to the user - i.e.
		If you get astonished by what a function does, either your function solves the wrong problem or it has a wrong name.
		Use tagged tuples as the principle data structure when sending messages between different parts of the system.
	www.erlang.se /doc/programming_rules.shtml (5344 words)

	EPSScentral - EPSS & Technology - Web Applications
		According to Veen "The principles for Web design are pretty straightforward: know your audience, keep it simple, be fast, know the rules before you break them.
		There are at least three aspects to sites: information, experience, and interaction - fact (or fiction), form, and function, if you will.
		Basically, it's that old principle: "Garbage in—garbage out." No matter how good your search engine is, if you don't structure and organize your content well, the results the reader gets will be poor, particularly if you have a lot of content on your website.
	www.pcd-innovations.com /infosite/bbe_about.htm (3840 words)

	The Java Hall of Shame
		Some of these blemishes make the Java system hard to implement, while some violate the all-important Principle of Least Astonishment.
		A system and its commands should behave the way most people would predict, that is, the system should operate with "least astonishment."
		Both of these are clear violations of the Principle of Least Astonishment.
	www.cs.arizona.edu /projects/sumatra/hallofshame (775 words)

	"ALMOST INCONCEIVABLE" CHANGES IN THE GEOMAGNETIC FIELD
		A decade ago, a trio of geophysicists published a group of papers based on their measurements of the remnant magnetism of the 16-million-year-old layered lava flows at Steens Mountain, Oregon.
		Should this be actually so, the whole field of paleomagnetism, including plate tectonics, is undermined, for it depends upon similar measurements.
		The earth's molten core can change rapidly, at least in some regions, in response to forces still unrecognized.
	www.science-frontiers.com /sf101/sf101g11.htm (331 words)

	davidflanagan.com: Pop Quiz: Java Shift Operators
		In response to a comment about Java violating the principle of least astonishment, I realized that I didn't know what the answer to this quiz was for C. I assume that Java inherits the behavior from C. I haven't written C in years, but I managed to crank out this program
		I think this is a case where Java violates the principle of least astonishment.
		ARM has a novel variation on surprises in this area (at least bag in ye olde PROG26 days).
	www.davidflanagan.com /blog/000021.html (547 words)

	The ‘principle of least astonishment’!
		TJ Archive > Volume 9 Issue 2 > The ‘principle of least astonishment’!
		So ran the heading in the journal Nature, as geophysicist Ronald Merrill of the University of Washington (Seattle) tried to grapple (unsuccessfully) with the newly published evidence confirming that ‘extraordinarily rapid’ reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field have indeed occurred.
		most geomagnetists dismissed the claim by applying the principle of least astonishment—‘it was easier to believe that these lava flows did not accurately record the changes in the earth’s magnetic field than to believe that there was something fundamentally wrong with the conventional wisdom of the day’
	www.answersingenesis.org /tj/v9/i2/astonishment.asp (1154 words)

	David Walend's Blog: Naming Generic Types
		I still don't understand why they do it, but at least now I now that I'm not the only one who thought full type names would be better.
		By violating the recommendation of the JLS, you're also violating the Principle of Least Astonishment.
		It looks like in order to violate the least astonishment for the most people, we would have to choose something other than a capital letter, since people see the capital letter and straight away think 'ah, its a class'.
	weblogs.java.net /blog/dwalend/archive/2004/12/naming_generic_1.html (1744 words)

	Musings of The GeekWithA.45
		As I work building software against a tight schedule on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, (when I shoot be out playing with the kids or shooting) I recall The Principle of Least Astonishment, as elucidated by my good friend, The Mighty and Egregious Charles.
		The principle of least astonishment holds that when the user takes some action with an interface, the result should be the least astonishing thing possible.
		They dedicated this country to the principle of unalienable rights and drafted constitutional provisions to limit our otherwise democratic government from acting against these rights.
	geekwitha45.blogspot.com /2003_10_12_geekwitha45_archive.html (3847 words)

	Coding Standards
		Most of the principles presented here are covered more fully there.
		Much of what is below is lifted directly from the relevant passages of this book.
		The following principles are taken from the Decision Aid group coding standard.
	www.cs.umb.edu /visualization/QA/CodingStandard.htm (406 words)

	Free Articles And Article Contents - Free Articles For Download Via RSS And Ezines (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-07)
		This problem might be considered to be a mild form of linkrot, and Google's handling of it increases usability by satisfying user expectations that the search terms will be on the returned web page.
		This satisfies the principle of least astonishment since the user normally expects the search terms to be on the returned pages.
		Increased search relevance makes these cached pages very useful, even beyond the fact that they may contain data that may no longer be available elsewhere.
	www.articleoptimizer.com /ezineready.php?id=622 (1255 words)

	elearningpost » IBM Developer Works: The Principle
		IBM Developer Works: The Principle of Least Astonishment
		It's called the Principle of Least Astonishment -- the assertion that the most usable system is the one that least often leaves users astonished.
		Web pages violate this rule constantly, flagrantly, and in ways that produce a great deal of the ill-will that Web designers sometimes face.
	www.elearningpost.com /blog/ibm_developer_works_the_principle (117 words)

	ICANN urges VeriSign to suspend SiteFinder \| The Register
		A report from the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), released last weekend, says the VeriSign's changes have had "undesirable and unintended consequences", imposing a overhead on users, and affecting the robustness of the Internet.
		The document suggests VeriSign's "wildcard" service goes against "two basic principles of architectural design which have served the Internet well for many years": the Robustness Principle and the (splendidly named) Principle Of Least Astonishment, which says a program should always respond in the way that is least likely to astonish the user.
		The IAB's highly critical report on DNS Wildcards can be found here.
	www.theregister.co.uk /2003/09/22/icann_urges_verisign_to_suspend (450 words)

	Computer Programming Standards
		Changes for any reason carry a risk of introducing defects.
		We adhere to the Principle of Least Astonishment.
		We avoid doing things that may surprise people (other programmers and users of our software).
	www.wilsonmar.com /1pgmstds.htm (510 words)

	httpd-1.3 patchlets \| Apache \| Dev
		I think this adheres to the principle of least astonishment.
		Let me know if you can fudge that in.
		I think this adheres to the principle of least
	www.gossamer-threads.com /lists/apache/dev/291608 (521 words)

	Print - Permission Changes Surprise Mobile Device Administrators
		Security is a tricky thing; there's always pressure to balance improved security against user convenience.
		You also need to consider factors such as backward-compatibility and the Principle of Least Astonishment (which says that software should always be written so that its behavior is as unsurprising as possible).
		The difficulty of trading off security against functionality has recently been highlighted by a change Microsoft made to the way mailbox permissions are applied in Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange 2000 Server.
	www.windowsitpro.com /articles/print.cfm?articleid=50239 (1032 words)

	Big C++ Lab - Chapter 17 Operator Overloading
		Add the three overloaded functions in the space below.
		One of the most common types of errors in operator overloading is the violation of the principle of least astonishment.
		Which operators within this lab violate the principle of least astonishment for this particular application?
	www.horstmann.com /bigcpp/labs/BigC_ch17.htm (689 words)

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