Alex Miller's technical blog
I made this up years ago but it holds today as much as ever:
The Miller Principle: No one reads anything.
This principle applies to the following:
I had some other principles too but I figured no one would read them…. :)
[...] I only made it through the first sentence of The Miller Principle before I stopped reading. I can only guess what he’s talking about…whatever it is, it’s probably good. [...]
[...] Pure Danger Tech » Blog Archive » The Miller Principle (tags: miller principle) [...]
[...] The Miller Principle [...]
[...] Personally, I’m not willing to go quite this far, but I appreciate the sentiment. It certainly resonates well with the Miller Principle. [...]
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Hi! My name is Alex Miller and I live in St. Louis. I write code for a living and currently work for Revelytix on semantic web products.
In the past I worked for Terracotta, BEA Systems, and MetaMatrix. My main language for the last decade has been Java, although I’m interested in many different languages. I am the founder of the Lambda Lounge user group and the Strange Loop developer conference.
Catch me on Twitter as @puredanger.
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Wonderful ! But I know I read lots of docs/specs at least (and usually groan about how incomplete and ambiguous they are). You clearly do too. So maybe it should be “No one ELSE reads anything”…
good observation. When being whipped by business to make it cheap and fast, we don’t have time to do it well. Words make the software neither cheaper nor reach the deadline faster, so who needs them?
I would add: code comments and any email longer than one line!
;-)
Nice principle but do you have any examples of things this principle might apply to?
You should write some more principles too!
I can only assume these comments were really funny as I didn’t really get around to reading them.
I think this is only true with poorly written things. I’ve written specs that were not only read, but remembered years later and requested for specific content.
You just have to do a good job writing it.
@Erik: Actually, I think it’s fairly pervasive even for well written documents. But of course, good writing is more likely to be read.
Yep. And never ask more than one question in an email, too. Only one will be answered.
What is the miller principle ?
The last two entries are funny and sadly true more often than not.
hi i enjoyed the read
According to Steve McConnell’s excellent book “Code Complete”, good code equals readable code. So, good code doesn’t need comments anymore. By the way, code is not all. So, I don’t agree with you on some points. If many consultants are paid by the massive paper weight they produce, in the other hand, effective documentation exists. It just needs to be well distilled with a constant goal : communicate only the good information.