Atwood's Law

English[edit]

Coined by American software developer, author, blogger and entrepreneur Jeff Atwood in 2007 (see quotation below).

(programming, humorous) A tongue-in-cheek "law" of software development stating that "any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript."
- 2007 July 17, Jeff Atwood, “The Principle of Least Power”, in Coding Horror‎^[1], archived from the original on 2024-02-07:
  This was later codified in a more formal W3C document, The Rule of Least Power. I propose a corollary to this rule, which in the spirit of recent memes, I'll call Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.
- 2014, Eric Elliott, Programming JavaScript Applications, Sebastopol, C.A.: O'Reilly, →ISBN, page 2:
  Since that time, web developers have produced nearly every type of application, including full-blown, cloud-based office suites (see Zoho.com), social APIs like Facebook's JavaScript SDK, and even graphically intensive video games. ¶ All of this is serving to prove Atwood's Law (http://bit.ly/1pFCjtR): "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript."