The "80/20 Rule" is credited to Vilfredo Pareto, a 19th century economist. This principle has been restated a number of ways in computing literature:
- 80% of the users use only 20% of an application's functionality, the idea being that an application has a lot of features that few people use.
- 80% of the work is done by 20% of the programming staff, the idea being that some programmers are more productive than others, by a dramatic margin.
- 80% of an application's processing time is spent in 20% of the code, the idea being that only a small fraction of a program truly benefits from extensive optimization.
Lately, there's been a lot of discussion of the "long tail", which is sort of an inverse of this concept - that 80% of the books sold come from 20% of the actual available titles, yet with electronic distribution, the other 80% of available titles could be monetized much more efficiently.
In the context of this site, the idea for the name came about because I wanted a site where I could experiment with things without perfecting them; that I could use an "it's just good enough" philosophy and not get lost in analysis paralysis and bureaucracy.