Common misconceptions programmers have about lists of common misconceptions

John Ohno
2 min readAug 9, 2019
  1. A ‘common misconceptions’ list is an unordered collection of common misconceptions
  2. The order of a ‘common misconceptions’ list corresponds to how common the misconception is
  3. The order of a ‘common misconceptions’ list has no didactic or rhetorical function
  4. The misconceptions on a ‘common misconceptions’ list are all common
  5. The misconceptions on a ‘common misconceptions’ list are mostly common
  6. The misconceptions on a ‘common misconceptions’ list can be simultaneously held by a single person
  7. Any given person can be expected to hold two contiguous misconceptions in the list at the same time
  8. Any two contiguous misconceptions in the list can be held at the same time
  9. Any two contiguous misconceptions in the list are directly or thematically related
  10. Contiguity in such a list does not matter, since there is no underlying connection
  11. The repetitive nature of a ‘common misconceptions’ list is for purely rhetorical effect
  12. The repetitive nature of a ‘common misconceptions’ list is not for rhetorical effect
  13. A ‘common misconceptions’ list can be understood by someone with no background or practical experience in the subject
  14. A ‘common misconceptions’ list does not explain anything not already…

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John Ohno

Resident hypertext crank. Author of Big and Small Computing: Trajectories for the Future of Software. http://www.lord-enki.net