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Phrases in computing that might need retiring

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Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#131

Post by quickthrower2 »

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…

There are some differences between “tech debt” and “debt”:

Debt has to be serviced, and if it isn’t some asset is probably forfeited or you can be forced into bankruptcy. Not so for tech debt.

Debt is known for certain in a measurable quantity. Tech debt is not measurable and only exists to the extent people argue it exists. Two engineers may disagree in how much tech debt there is.

Debt can be used to fund things with a clear nexus. I borrow $1m to buy a house. Tech debt is taking on often unknowingly or even as a result of software dependency upgrades (or cloud) that turn debt-free into debted software silently.

There are probably plenty of other differences that make it a sort of half-applicable metaphor.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#132

Post by yccs27 »

autoexec wrote: post #77

I was expecting "master" and "slave" to show up since I've seen that argument being made ( https://www.eetimes.com/its-time-for-ieee-to-retire-master-s... ), but I have a hard time taking it seriously. I agree about AI though. The rush to exploit the phrase as a marketing term has killed it's original meaning. Once we actually have AI we're going to need something else to call it. I've always kind of liked the distin…

I find it pretty helpful to just accept the new meaning of "artificial intelligence": a program making a decision you didn't explicitly code it to make. Note that this includes even the most basic statistical decision methods, which the term is used for not too infrequently.

We already have more specifuc technical words for the approaches that are generally sold as "artificial intelligence", like neural networks/machine learning etc.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#133

Post by quickthrower2 »

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…

I thought devops was the cattle not pets mentality. Script all the things. Then CI. Then Terraform. Not necessarily that tool, but that class of solution.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#134

Post by Iv »

“psychologist/neuroscientist developing computer models to understand how intelligence works” is a very niche domain of artificial intelligence which has, for half a century, meant "the attempt to duplicate intelligence in algorithms"

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#135

Post by quickthrower2 »

silisili wrote: post #31
fishbacon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At my company, it's now just a term for the person who has full AWS access.

Opsec hates devops!

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#137

Post by quickthrower2 »

danielscrubs wrote: post #108
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.

What’s your thoughts about the term “literally”? It’s one of my bugbears, because the term lost its meaning and I don’t know of any good replacement…

It lost it’s meaning in as early as 1876 apparently so you can’t blame kids these days.

But I don’t like its use as a hyperbolic no-op.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#138

Post by Avamander »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #131
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…

There are some differences between “tech debt” and “debt”: Debt has to be serviced, and if it isn’t some asset is probably forfeited or you can be forced into bankruptcy. Not so for tech debt. Debt is known for certain in a measurable quantity. Tech debt is not measurable and only exists to the extent people argue it exists. Two engineers may disagree in how much tech debt there is. Debt can be used to fund things wi…

> Debt has to be serviced, and if it isn’t some asset is probably forfeited or you can be forced into bankruptcy. Not so for tech debt.

It is so for tech debt though. If you keep on accumulating it, at some point it's gonna have very negative effects: a ransomware incident, data leak or even a total company-wide standstill.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#140

Post by olalonde »

> Luckily the industry doesn’t really use this term [OOP] any more so we can ignore the changed meaning.

OOP is still a widely used term today.

> It used to mean “not waterfall” and now means “waterfall with a status meeting every day and an internal demo every two weeks”.

That doesn't sound waterfall-y at all.

> If you can hire a “DevOps engineer” to fulfil a specific role on a software team then we have all lost at using the phrase DevOps.

DevOps was never about eliminating all operations roles. It is about better cooperation between dev and ops.

> This one used to mean “psychologist/neuroscientist developing computer models to understand how intelligence works” and now means “an algorithm pushed to production by a programmer who doesn’t understand it”.

No, that's never what it meant. It was always a branch of computer science, going as far back as Alan Turing.[0]

> Previously something very specific used in the context of financial technology development.

Not at all. It was coined by Ward Cunningham[1] who happened to be working on financial software. The metaphor was never meant to be restricted to financial software. The fact he was working on financial software is largely irrelevant other than possibly having given him inspiration for the metaphor.

> Was originally the idea that maybe the things your software does should depend on the things the customers want it to do. Now means automated tests with some particular syntax.

Again, completely wrong. The article that introduced BDD was explicitly about automated testing.[2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...

[1] http://c2.com/doc/oopsla92.html

[2] https://dannorth.net/introducing-bdd/

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