Comment by patrickmay
1 day ago
Exactly. Hyrum's Law should always be paired with Postel's Law: Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
1 day ago
Exactly. Hyrum's Law should always be paired with Postel's Law: Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
Being liberal in what you accept also leads to users depending on you accepting marginal input that exploits implementation quirks, either because the quirks get the job done or for more nefarious reasons.
Yeah, I definitely don't agree with the "be liberal in what you accept" paradigm. It's worth it to force users to send correctly-formed data, IMO.
It's also worth writing yourself some smoke tests that tell you when your very important customer starts sending total garbage to your servers and expects you to just handle it because they're paying you instead of the other way around. Even a couple hours of additional warning that you're about to get pulled into an uncomfortable conference call can greatly improve outcomes.
There's a veritable sewer in the area where Hyrum and Postel intersect.