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Atwood's Law

Atwood's Law proper noun: a tongue-in-cheek "law" of software development stating that "any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.".

Proper noun

Atwood's Law

  1. (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."
    • 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.2007 July 17, Jeff Atwood, “The Principle of Least Power”, in Coding Horror, archived from the original on 07 Feb 2024
    • 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...2014, Eric Elliott, Programming JavaScript Applications, Sebastopol, C.A.: O'Reilly, →ISBN, page 2

Origin of Atwood's Law

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

Questions about Atwood's Law

What does Atwood's Law mean?
Atwood's Law means a tongue-in-cheek "law" of software development stating that "any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.".
What part of speech is Atwood's Law?
Atwood's Law is a proper noun.

Words near Atwood's Law in the dictionary

  1. Atwood
  2. Atwood machine
  3. Atwood machines
  4. Atwood number
  5. Atwood numbers
  6. Atwood's Law
  7. Atwood's machine
  8. Atwoodian
  9. Atwoods
  10. atwound
  11. ATWS

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Atwood's Law (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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