Golden Hammer "For a hammer everything is nails."

For a hammer everything is nails.

Golden Hammer Law

This “law” is widely used in engineering, in our case especially, when we talk about design patterns or rather anti-design patterns.

It is a phrase that has always excited me for its simplicity, roundness and accuracy. (That’s what a hammer is :D for)

That is why I have started to do some research and did you know that this law has several names?

• The law of the instrument
• Maslow’s hammer
• Gavel Hammer
• Golden Hammer

This is due to the different uses and people who have given meaning to this “law”

History

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The English expression “A Birmingham screwdriver” where screwdriver would be the hammer instead of screwdriver, refers to the habit of using one tool for all purposes and dates back to the eighteenth century at least.

However, history has wanted this phrase to be attributed to some authors a century later:

The first recorded use of the concept corresponds to Abraham Kaplan, in 1964: " Lo call it the law of instrumento" and can be formulated as follows: " If you give a child a hammer, it will seem to him that everything he encounters needs a blow." _

Other uses of this concept, also called Maslow’s _Martillo, and popularly formulated as " If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail," come from Abraham Maslow’s book “The Psychology of Science,” published in 1966.

Both are credited with knowing it as " The Law of the hammer_" (T _he law of the ) but they may not be the original authors.

The concept has also been attributed to Mark Twain , but there is no published evidence of this origin.

Under the name " Baruch’s Observation" it has also been attributed to the entrepreneur and author Bernard M Baruch.

Related Concepts

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Other forms of narrow-minded instrumentalism include: professionnelle déformation, a French term for " seeing things from the point of view of one’s profession," and the capture of the regulator, the tendency of regulators to look at things from the point of view of the profession they are regulating.

The notion of a golden _martillo, " a familiar technology or concept obsessively applied to all software problems," has been introduced into the information technology literature in 1998 as an anti-pattern . a programming practice to be avoided.

A gold hammer (or golden hammer) is any tool, technology, paradigm or similar whose supporters exaggerate it. They predict that it will solve multiple problems, even those for which it is obviously not suitable. In the same way that a physical gold hammer would be quite impressive but practically useless, since](http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oro “Oro”) gold [is a relatively malleable metal.

The concept is closely related to the phrase " When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail." The phrase conjures up the mental image of a child who has gotten his first hammer and a few nails. Driving them in gives him great satisfaction, and when he’s run out, then everything else starts to look like nails — he’s tempted to hammer things that aren’t nails because doing so would also be fun and easy. Applying the same idea to the world of tools and technologies, it’s often normal for us to try to reuse a technology or tool that has been useful to us in the past, even if it’s no longer the most suitable, in new projects.

The antonym of oro_’s _martillo is “use the right tool for each thing”, a rule that ironically can also become a golden hammer.

Source: Wikipedia