Live data from Hacker News

Secret language

joelonsoftware.com

1–10 of 25 posts

Re: Secret language

#3
Jargon arises because it is useful for compressing information exchanged within a given culture. If this really was an internal posting which was accidentally exposed, what is the problem with using the jargon of Microsoft's culture?

Re: Secret language

#4
The hiring manager probably meant for it to be an internal only posting but failed at posting. The training you get very early on as a manager-of-managers covers how to write good job postings, and avoiding ridiculous acronyms is part of it.

Fear of IP taint has traditionally kept most MSFT teams away from direct external contact, except through legal-approved intermediaries. Maybe Joel has forgotten that after fifteen years away? I'd stake money he didn't "talk to anyone outside the company" when working on VBA :-)

Re: Secret language

#5
Judging from their performance in the marketplace, it sounds like their internal jargon describes a model of the competitive landscape that's pretty successful. Just like in programming, any model complicated enough is best expressed in terms of a DSL.

Re: Secret language

#7
Microsoft is certainly not the only guilty party in this respect. Overuse of jargon and, more egregiously, failure to appropriately define all but the most universally well-known abbreviations at the point where the abbreviated form is first used in the text is a pervasive problem in the field. For example, the first few responses to this article use a total of four domain-specific abbreviations (IP, MSFT, VBA, and DSL), none of which were defined by the authors. Worse, within the field, the meaning of one of the abbreviations (DSL) is context-sensitive and the author's intended meaning is the lesser known one. The appropriate convention, used in virtually every other technical domain, is to explicitly state what the abbreviation or acronym stands for when it is first used in the text and then use it as much as you like in the rest of the text. Only a very small subset of abbreviations that are certain to be recognized by everyone in the field, regardless of their subspecialty, may be used without defining the term.

Re: Secret language

#8
Joel's not really contributing anything here, and as I've said elsewhere, this is marketing-speak, not Microsoft-speak. At least, I never heard anyone talk like this when I was there over the summer. I learned some new words ("dogfooding") and people do call Ballmer "SteveB" (just as they often refer to coworkers by their email aliases), but I can assure you this posting is as incomprehensible to most Microsoft engineers as it is to you.

Re: Secret language

#9
OK, but to be fair to MS, this appears to have been written by a nonnative English speaker. Indian, I think. So there's another factor at work.

Re: Secret language

#10
post #7

Microsoft is certainly not the only guilty party in this respect. Overuse of jargon and, more egregiously, failure to appropriately define all but the most universally well-known abbreviations at the point where the abbreviated form is first used in the text is a pervasive problem in the field. For example, the first few responses to this article use a total of four domain-specific abbreviations (IP, MSFT, VBA, and D…

Somehow I find it difficult to believe that anyone who even knows about Hacker News, much less anyone who actually reads it would have interpreted the one comment to have said "any model complicated enough is best expressed in terms of a Digital Subscriber Line".

Unless there is some other computer-related meaning for the abbreviation DSL (besides Domain-Specific Language, of course) that I'm not aware of. :-D

Post reply on HN