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Phrases in computing that might need retiring

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281–290 of 291 posts

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#281
post #7

If this were a comment on HN, I would give it one of my rare downvotes. It's dismissive and negative without any compensating value or positivity. Maybe suggestions of terms to use?

I always find the position of telling people to never point out problems, only suggestions or solutions odd. From something as basic as a management philosophy of "don't come to me with problems, come to me with solutions" to this "Don't suggest terms not to use, suggest terms to use" A person can identify a problem without having a solution, or identify something is wrong without knowing the full solution. So in thi…

> I always find the position of telling people to never point out problems, only suggestions or solutions odd.

The article went lower than pointing out problems. It veered into toxicity, its claim to "irreverence" notwithstanding. From the first:

> Object-Oriented Programming: Luckily the industry doesn’t really use this term any more so we can ignore the changed meaning. The small club of people who still care can use it correctly, everybody else can carry on not using it. Just be aware when diving through the history books that it might mean “extreme late binding of all things” or it might mean “modules, but using the word class” depending on the age of the text.

The reference to the "small club of people who still care can use it correctly" is elitist, and he does not bother to define the term (other than in a meaningless call-out to his fellow club members). The casual readers who are not members of his self-described club are not left with helpful information to decide for themselves when and and what use of the term may or may not be wrong. It's just "If you know, then you know" phrasing.

The tone does not improve through the rest of the article. I'm not sure this fellow should be teaching beginners how to program.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#282
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

finally! A phrase so broad with so many applications that nobody will know what we're talking about!

Have you heard of Dynamic Programming?

The definition I have of DP is : "refactoring recursive algorithms into iterative ones by storing intermediate values (generally into arrays). It generally has performance gains due to avoiding redundant calls, at the cost of making algorithms less clear / readable "

At least that's pretty much what cs classes taught a few years ago

That seems pretty well-defined to me?

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve also found a lot of devops to be generally unhelpful and adversarial as well. They seem to forget the developer part of the job title and don’t help the developers deliver value to the customer. Instead some devops teams just break things unannounced, make sweeping changes that leave everyone unhappy, require unnecessary extra steps for simple procedures, and remain passive or negative. I call those teams “devel…

That resonates with my experience at large as well, which I find to be unfortunate. I actually have come across a number of highly knowledgeable and talented sysadmins along the way, and I truly wanted the Dev part of DevOps to work and invested a lot of personal effort into trying to make it work although in vain each and every time. Such individuals also have a tendency to create new, deeply entrenched silos that c…

It’s very unfortunate! I don’t really know of a good solution other than stronger and more collaborative leadership preventing these “us vs them” silos. In effect the developers should be considered the customers of the devops team therefore they should be doing everything they can to aid the developers. Or, just have them in the sane team.

Yes definitely you can use it, credit would be nice though if the expression becomes well known ha ;)

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#284
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of Dynamic Programming?

The definition I have of DP is : "refactoring recursive algorithms into iterative ones by storing intermediate values (generally into arrays). It generally has performance gains due to avoiding redundant calls, at the cost of making algorithms less clear / readable " At least that's pretty much what cs classes taught a few years ago That seems pretty well-defined to me?

Oh, dynamic programming as a concept makes perfect sense and it's very useful and well-defined.

However the origin of the name is bonkers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#History

> I spent the Fall quarter (of 1950) at RAND. My first task was to find a name for multistage decision processes. An interesting question is, "Where did the name, dynamic programming, come from?" The 1950s were not good years for mathematical research. We had a very interesting gentleman in Washington named Wilson. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had a pathological fear and hatred of the word "research". I’m not using the term lightly; I’m using it precisely. His face would suffuse, he would turn red, and he would get violent if people used the term research in his presence. You can imagine how he felt, then, about the term mathematical. The RAND Corporation was employed by the Air Force, and the Air Force had Wilson as its boss, essentially. Hence, I felt I had to do something to shield Wilson and the Air Force from the fact that I was really doing mathematics inside the RAND Corporation. What title, what name, could I choose? In the first place I was interested in planning, in decision making, in thinking. But planning, is not a good word for various reasons. I decided therefore to use the word "programming". I wanted to get across the idea that this was dynamic, this was multistage, this was time-varying. I thought, let's kill two birds with one stone. Let's take a word that has an absolutely precise meaning, namely dynamic, in the classical physical sense. It also has a very interesting property as an adjective, and that is it's impossible to use the word dynamic in a pejorative sense. Try thinking of some combination that will possibly give it a pejorative meaning. It's impossible. Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. It was something not even a Congressman could object to. So I used it as an umbrella for my activities.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#285
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I think we have to look to Alan Kay for an original definition, since he invented the term, and according to him, inheritance is not a necessary part of object orientation. In Smalltalk (and various Lisps), inheritance is something that is created from objects and messages, not a fundamental feature of the language. In [one place]( http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay... ) he defines it as "OO…

Alan Kay's definition of OO has drifted over the years as he tries to exclude any language that is not Smalltalk.

He is free to do that, but we have no need to play along.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#286
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May be we should try 1990's style waterfall dev shop. Play Radiohead and Pearl Jam in the office. Everyone wears shorts + tennis shoes with super long white socks. Monthly powerpoint updates on how things are going, PM gets to have some fun with sharpie markers to tick off checkboxes next to each feature that was planned. Dedicated QA department, and they have the coolest arcade machine, it is the Street Fighter mach…

Frontend devs? It's 1990s!

Arguably - if you knew about RS232 and friends, were familiar with some terminal hardware (I knew more than I should have about Wyse 60s), understood the tty interface, and programmed using terminfo/termcap/curses… then you might be called a front end programmer from the 90s.

Which, dear god, I just realised I was a front end programmer in the 90s!

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#287
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same (re: master / slave)... At a previous job, a coworker presented a compelling argument for removing "whitelist" and "blacklist" terminology from our codebases / jargon. Even though the etymologies of the words don't describe them as being based on race / racial judgments, their first recorded usages were in the 16th-17th centuries, when mass enslavement was in full swing. Setting aside the historical context, the…

> Even though the etymologies of the words don't describe them as being based on race / racial judgments Then why should we change them? I know you said: > Setting aside the historical context, they also help reenforce the idea of "white is good, black is bad" But if we can't trust people to infer a word's meaning based on the context, we have a much bigger problem imo. Another example of this is the word gentleman.…

> I don't get when or why we suddenly decided that people can't infer the context of words.

Probably around the time people decided intent no longer matters and that words are violence.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#288
post #252
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, and I designed an UI for my smartwatch OS. For which I wrote everything from the ground up.

Still not quite there. You haven't mentioned whether you make pancakes or not.

I do sometimes make pancakes.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% you are a dude.

What rules you used to infer my sex from the text of my comment?

Apparently you are really curious about getting to the bottom of this so I did my research.

For me it's a vague intuition. But women are much better are recognizing "men talk" than I am.

So I asked one woman how she does it and here is her answer

> Men make comments without revealing their gender, but we can see the comments are coming from a man's point of view.

> How do we know?

> We have a lifetime of experience listening to a man's point of view.

> In other words, they show their asses much more than they think.

Re: Phrases in computing that might need retiring

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What rules you used to infer my sex from the text of my comment?

Apparently you are really curious about getting to the bottom of this so I did my research. For me it's a vague intuition. But women are much better are recognizing "men talk" than I am. So I asked one woman how she does it and here is her answer > Men make comments without revealing their gender, but we can see the comments are coming from a man's point of view. > How do we know? > We have a lifetime of experience l…

So men are the only people who comment without revealing their gender? What about trans individuals? Does that mean I can reliably mask my gender by deciding whether or not I mention it in my comments and posts?

And this still doesn't answer what rules you or the men's talk expert you asked use. Anybody can claim they have "a lifetime of experience" in anything they want, but without either an empirical success rate or a set of explicit testable rules, it's all bullshit out of their ass.

>We have a lifetime of experience listening to a man's point of view.

I and a lot of other men have a lifetime of experience listening to women's point of view too, and yet I can find no sane man who claims they can identify gender from text, unless in very special cases.

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