C. Northcote Parkinson and journalist Ann Fry (1921–1983), with whom he had two sons and a daughter. In 1958, while still in Singapore, he published his most famous work, "Parkinson's Law", which expanded upon a humorous article that he had published in the "Economist" magazine in November 1955, satirising government bureaucracies. The 120-page book of short studies, published in the United States and then in Britain, was illustrated by Osbert Lancaster and became an instant best seller. It explained the inevitability of bureaucratic expansion, arguing that 'work expands to fill the time available for its completion'. Typical of his satire and cynical humour,
Robustness principle Robustness principle In computing, the robustness principle is a design guideline for software: The principle is also known as Postel's law, after Jon Postel, who wrote in an early specification of TCP: In other words, programs that send messages to other machines (or to other programs on the same machine) should conform completely to the specifications, but programs that receive messages should accept non-conformant input as long as the meaning is clear. Among programmers, to produce compatible functions, the principle is popularized in the form be contravariant in the input type and covariant in the output type. RFC 1122 (1989)