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Phrases in computing that might need retiring

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Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#241

Post by ryathal »

Volundr wrote: post #236

Under AI: > "actually a collection of if statements but last I checked AI wasn’t a protected term” This describes an Expert System which has been a form of AI since at least the 70s. If the author doesn't want it classified as AI it's the author that is trying to shift the definition, not that the definition has drifted.

I prefer an old professors definition of AI, "Computer research in commercially non-viable solutions." Anything AI discovers that is useful becomes rebranded into some other tech. Machine learning is the most recent thing that's starting to break out of the AI umbrella.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#242

Post by lamontcg »

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…

> It's really job title for "sysadmin but paid and owned by the software department to keep ITs fingers out of everyone's shit"

Most devops aren't really fully-fledged sysadmins though.

The job of babysitting software and coming up with SLOs was always the part of system engineering that I hated. It wasn't digging through production outages with strace and tcpdump. They actually defined that as something that we didn't need any more so all DevOps gets is metrics and logs and they can't touch production at all and defined that job out of existence.

(Then every now and then I see some devops person pleading for information on how to deploy tools like tcpdump and strace to production and I can see that the technical foundation of devops is a pack of lies)

Also, devops is more "oh fuck they want to give all the devs a pager, quick hire some junior devs to give the pagers to and we'll call them devops".

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#243

Post by mywittyname »

hyperman1 wrote: post #76
doctor_eval wrote: post #2

> "Agile: Nope, this one’s in the bin, I’m afraid. It used to mean “not waterfall” and now means “waterfall with a status meeting every day and an internal demo every two weeks”. 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…" Yup. :-(

AFAIK, waterfall was always a straw man meant to knock down. Nobody sane ever did a pure waterfall model. The model came from http://www-scf.usc.edu/~csci201/lectures/Lecture11/royce1970... and describes it as risky in that very paper. Notice diagram 2 (the waterfall), 3 (the dream) and 4(the reality). We had expensive agile consultants coming in a bit after 2000. They were telling us the current official process, RU…

I remember working at a company whose "agile transformation" was a disaster, costing the company boat loads of money. After that, we used RUP because agile was a dirty word in that office. We even had posters and such on the walls praising RUP.

Nothing actually changed. Standups became morning meetings, sprints were iterations, sprint review became feature review, and sprint planning became elaboration meetings.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#244

Post by ncmncm »

imtringued wrote: post #227
TT-392 wrote: post #96

Object-Oriented Programming: "Luckily the industry doesn’t really use this term any more" Wait really? What world are they living in? Am I just out of touch or something?

OOP is pretty well defined. 99% of the time it means type dependent namespaces. Class A.foo and Class B.foo both represent separate namespaces in which a field or method foo can be defined, the name space is directly tied to a type. In Haskell every function is defined in what amounts to be a global namespace. This is particularly annoying when you have records that share the same attribute names. You might argue tha…

By that, then, you mean undefined.

It once meant that three features appeared: encapsulation, inheritance, and constrained runtime binding.

Any time it is used without implying those, it is just more or less noise.

That said, OO has become a niche technique: it fits certain problem spaces well, others very badly. Any big enough system will have some parts that could meaningfully be described as mostly OO. But there is no value in purity, so none in distinguishing those bits, particularly, or excluding non-OO notions there.

Trying to cram all solutions into the OO shoe by providing no support for any other organization (cough Java) damaged the brand, probably irreparably. It still makes sense to say part of a system has an OO flavor, for exposition, but there is little value, otherwise.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#245

Post by ncmncm »

tome wrote: post #240
imtringued wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OOP is pretty well defined. 99% of the time it means type dependent namespaces. Class A.foo and Class B.foo both represent separate namespaces in which a field or method foo can be defined, the name space is directly tied to a type. In Haskell every function is defined in what amounts to be a global namespace. This is particularly annoying when you have records that share the same attribute names. You might argue tha…

Is using structs in C OOP by that definition?

Would be, but isn't.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#246

Post by autoexec »

b3morales wrote: post #219
Dudeman112 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Once we actually have AI we're going to need something else to call it You mean Artificial General Intelligence? ;) On a more serious note, it is a shame that we ended up calling it AI instead of something innocuous like "pattern matching code". There's so much bullshit and misunderstanding that wouldn't be there if we had named it something less impressive

This isn't really a problem of the term itself; it's more that people want their software product to sound impressive, so they borrow the term liberally. That is, it's marketing's fault. People have been arguing since Minsky or before where the "Actual Artificial Intelligence" line falls. Thermostats? Graphing calculators? Roombas? Software games? ...

> People have been arguing since Minsky or before where the "Actual Artificial Intelligence" line falls.

I think it'll find a way to tell us. Same with people worried about giving AI rights. Once it cares enough to ask, it should get them.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#247

Post by ncmncm »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #211
TT-392 wrote: post #96

Object-Oriented Programming: "Luckily the industry doesn’t really use this term any more" Wait really? What world are they living in? Am I just out of touch or something?

You aren't out of touch. Some people are just living in bubbles. There's still a massive amount of Java, C# and other OOP work going on out there.

Just because it is in Java (equivalently, C#) does not mean it is OO. Java just makes coding the non-OO parts of a system awkward and unnatural.

Of course most parts of most systems are non-OO.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#248

Post by ncmncm »

labrador wrote: post #48

"Blah blah considered harmful", "code smell", "anti-pattern" I hate them because they've become slang for any code that isn't written the way we like

All patterns are anti-patterns.

A pattern is just something your language is not expressive enough to capture and package in a library. If your language is evolving, what used to be patterns migrate into libraries. New patterns arise, and are later captured.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#249

Post by ncmncm »

ribit wrote: post #136

I am curious about this statement: [OOP] might mean ... “modules, but using the word class” I would argue that "modules" is almost as useless of a term as "OOP". What does the author mean exactly?

Author doesn't mean. Where the statement is accurate, if anywhere, the use of the term doesn't mean.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#250

Post by ncmncm »

papito wrote: post #45
throwntoday wrote: post #28

I wouldn't mind if "blockchain" as a buzzword died out. A blockchain is almost never the solution to a problem. And I don't even understand the point if it isn't decentralized.

"Blockchain" is more of a punchline now than an actual serious word used in technology.

Recruiters still say it. Because of course they do. :-)
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