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Phrases in computing that might need retiring

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Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#91

Post by hoseja »

tgv wrote: post #24
abainbridge wrote: post #10

Sinister used to mean left handed. "A shambles" used to mean a slaughterhouse. Sanction used to mean allow, now it means not allow. It is fine for words to change meaning, even to their own opposite. Natural language has done that forever. Edit: you're all right, sanction has both meanings.

While it's natural, I'm sure most words didn't change their meaning within a few years of introduction. > Natural language has done that forever. We've also "retired" words. On a large scale, as a matter of fact, so it's not really an argument against getting rid of "agile".

"Ell" used to mean arm.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#92

Post by fallingknife »

edrxty wrote: post #8

Strong disagree on "technical debt" Rather, the entire world is built on it and there's some level of acceptance required, but we definitely need a shorthand phrase for "we're doing something stupid that will save us time now and make us hate ourselves a year from now" Edit: thinking on it, also "devops". It's really job title for "sysadmin but paid and owned by the software department to keep ITs fingers out of ever…

In the forward looking sense you are using it, sure. In the backward looking way it's usually used ("development on that is slow because it's full of technical debt") it usually 10% what you are talking about and 90% over engineering and stupid things that were done for no good reason at all where no one at the time was even thinking about the tradeoff for speed.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#94

Post by srvmshr »

tobych wrote: post #3

Perhaps "API" could be added to this list. I've been jobhunting this week, and first I heard recruiters use "API" to refer to what I'd call a "service", then heard other quite senior developers do the same thing.

APIs, frameworks & libraries are so often being used interchangeably & its getting confusing for us too, specially if planning for a new feature to integrate

"is it a framework? is it a library? is it a API" whenever I have a cursory glance at a product on HN/Github or likewise

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#95

Post by kqr »

jon-wood wrote: post #90
edrxty wrote: post #8

Strong disagree on "technical debt" Rather, the entire world is built on it and there's some level of acceptance required, but we definitely need a shorthand phrase for "we're doing something stupid that will save us time now and make us hate ourselves a year from now" Edit: thinking on it, also "devops". It's really job title for "sysadmin but paid and owned by the software department to keep ITs fingers out of ever…

> also "devops". It's really job title for "sysadmin but paid and owned by the software department to keep ITs fingers out of everyone's shit" but with a flashy name that sounds important so mgmt will agree to it If that's what "devops" is now, sure, kill the term. Devop is not a job title, and I will die on that hill. The concept of DevOps is close collaboration between development and infrastructure teams throughou…

If that's what "devops" was before, we needed to kill the term earlier than you might think. Devops was originally a set of software release practises and culture that result in higher quality software, including high release cadence, blame-free postmortems, small patches, time for experimentation, automated testing, continuous integration, etc.

These practises normally require close collaboration between dev and infra, but are separate from it because you can have close collaboration on big, quarterly releases based on manually verified long-lived feature branches -- yet that is not devops.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#97

Post by turing_complete »

ebingdom wrote: post #83

> Reasoning About Software What's wrong with this? I need a way to describe techniques that make it easier to...well I don't even know another way to say it. Maybe I'm biased by my experience in formal verification, a field in which it's expected that you can formally study a program's behavior.

It should be replaced with the more accurate term 'handwaving about software'.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#98

Post by IanCal »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #42
ghayes wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and "debt" is a beautiful word here. It accurately describes receiving the value today, but then owing that time back, with interest, in the future.

Except it doesn't. It's a one-sided and misleading concept. The problem is usually finding a balance between "Let's hack some suicidally awful crap together quickly to see if we even have a market and then fix it when we have real income, except everyone knows we won't so it will be a permanent drag on the business" and "Let's build a beautiful extendable maintainable paragon of elegance and purity and ignore the fac…

Take on lots of debt and you'll have a quick flash and then years of problems. Refuse to take on any debt ever and you may never get to university or buy a house.

Taking on debt is not inherently good or bad, it's context dependent.

I feel it maps to technical debt very well.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#99

Post by dagw »

fishbacon wrote: post #25
silisili wrote: post #17

Oh man, I wish most of this would go away. RE: Agile 'We have to find a new way to discuss the idea that maybe we focus on the working software and not on the organisational bureaucracy, and that way does not involve the word…' Which is rather hilarious, because the only people I ever hear use the word agile are the beaurocrats. RE: DevOps, I still don't know what it actually means. When I first heard the term, it wa…

DevOps has in my experience become full stack + server maintenance + misc tool development.

Where I worked at least, DevOps didn't do anything "full stack" and had nothing to do with the developing or maintaining of any of the actual code that got deployed. They where responsible for working with the developers to come up with the best solution for having a secure and fast way for deploying and running an application. Sometimes they would help write custom deployment scripts or come with suggestions on how to make things easier from a deployment and/or performance point of view, but they never actually touched the code in any way.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#100

Post by darkwater »

jon-wood wrote: post #90
edrxty wrote: post #8

Strong disagree on "technical debt" Rather, the entire world is built on it and there's some level of acceptance required, but we definitely need a shorthand phrase for "we're doing something stupid that will save us time now and make us hate ourselves a year from now" Edit: thinking on it, also "devops". It's really job title for "sysadmin but paid and owned by the software department to keep ITs fingers out of ever…

> also "devops". It's really job title for "sysadmin but paid and owned by the software department to keep ITs fingers out of everyone's shit" but with a flashy name that sounds important so mgmt will agree to it If that's what "devops" is now, sure, kill the term. Devop is not a job title, and I will die on that hill. The concept of DevOps is close collaboration between development and infrastructure teams throughou…

> If that's what "devops" is now, sure, kill the term. Devop is not a job title, and I will die on that hill.

I'm afraid you are already dead then...

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