Sturgeon's law
expressionops culture
'Ninety percent of everything is crap.'
Science-fiction author Theodore Sturgeon coined it in the 1950s defending his genre: critics judged SF by its worst examples, though ninety percent of everything, in any field, is equally poor. Engineers reach for it when evaluating plugin ecosystems, npm search results, and conference submissions. The corollary matters more than the law: judge a field by its best ten percent.
Ninety percent of everything is crap. Theodore Sturgeon coined it defending science fiction from critics who judged the genre by its worst examples, and his point was comparative rather than cynical: ninety percent of literature, film and music is also poor, so singling out one field is unfair.
Applied to technology it is a useful corrective in both directions. Ninety percent of libraries, frameworks, conference talks and blog posts are unremarkable, which means encountering bad examples of something says almost nothing about the category. It also means that time spent filtering is not wasted time, it is the actual work of finding the ten percent.
The uncomfortable half is that it applies to your own output too. Most code anyone writes is ordinary, most ideas do not survive contact with implementation, and the ones that do are usually not the ones that felt most promising. That reading turns the law from a complaint into permission: producing a great deal of ordinary work is the normal path to the small amount that is not, and expecting every attempt to be excellent mostly prevents attempting.
Also known as: Sturgeon's revelation