I prefer Java is to JavaScript as car is to carpet. Just like there is some carpet in a car, there is some minor overlap, but they're totally different things.
I generally just tell people plainly that it was a marketing ploy and that they have nothing to do with each other aside from the fact that they are both programming languages.
In asymmetric cryptography, we have the terms "private key" and "public key". But the term "private key" is actually wrong.
Privacy is something you don't want the whole world to know.
Secrecy is something you don't want anyone to know.
Since what academics call a "private key" is something that you don't reveal to anyone else, the term "private" is wrong.
It should be, therefore, "secret key" and "public key".
The "private key" should, instead, be what you agree on with e.g. Diffie-Hellman. It makes more sense than "shared secret".
It also allows you to use sk and pk as variable names in cryptography APIs, instead of having to spell out pubKey and privKey since they both abbreviate to pk.
Secret key is most used for simmetric schemas. I get your point, but I think using private-key is right.
The real epic-fail in cryptography is about the misused "certificate" term:
A certificate is just the public-key plus the proven subject (owner) of the certificate signed by a Certification Authority. The certificate has not the private key but we can find things like
"install the certificate in the web server to configure the TLS...." or "sign with a certificate"
I get your point, but I think using private-key is right.
From A Cipherpunk's Manifesto by Eric Hughes (1993):
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.
Yes but... I can be wrong, I am not english native,... but I think privacy and private are not related , they seem to be but are indeed different and unrelated concepts, this is, a private key is not "something for keeping privacy" but "something for keeping confidentiality or secrets"...
Not sure at all about these...
Exactly! and you aren't really requesting to pull anything, if anything you are requesting to push something. Merge request sounds better but at the same time I've gotten so used to pull request even though it makes no sense
Scrolling through this list, I'm surprised "serverless" is like three-quarters of the way down. It's clearly the most glaring misnomer in recent programming memory.
Can you think of a better name for it? I think re: developer experience it's pretty fitting, since in practical terms it means not needing to set up, manage, maintain, or pay for a server (or even write any back-end code, depending on the implementation). It's not really accurate in technical terms of what's going on behind the curtain but I don't really think that's the point.
Apparently, "compiled language". Nearly all languages are compiled in many situations to something, so it's a meaningless phrase.
"Interpreted language" (final result executed via some form of a software interpreter) vs. "assembled language" (final result executed directly by the CPU as machine code) is more useful. Python and Java are examples of interpreted languages, although both are compiled in some fashion. C++ and FORTRAN are examples of assembled languages.
And yes, the designations are murky. Interpreters exist for typically assembled languages, and (generally impractical) means exist to assemble typically interpreted languages to machine code.
EDIT: Based on this thread, I'll add one more: an interactive language is one that is primarily run through a REPL (interactive shell).
This should not be confused with an interpreted language, which simply has a software layer between the shipped files (sometimes, bytecode that was compiled to) and direct execution.
Also, dependencies don't even enter into this discussion; any language has to resolve them somehow on the target machine.
EDIT 2: This thread (and related conversations) led to this...
Python and Java are examples of interpreted languages ... and (generally impractical) means exist to assemble typically interpreted languages to machine code
But Java is assembled to machine code at runtime, and it's extremely practical. I'd say interpreting Java is impractically slow!
No, Java is not assembled to machine code at any point, except in extraordinary implementations. It is compiled to bytecode, which is what is run through the interpreter, often the JVM.
EDIT: I omitted two words by mistake: at any point before shipping. JIT-compiling is pretty typical for interpreted languages; it doesn't make it an assembled language. So, yes, runtime still counts (towards interpreted.) My bad.
This was discussed and rehashed in some detail here:
Java is not assembled to machine code at any point
I'm sorry, but this is just plainly incorrect. Even an interpreter compiles down to machine code before execution, it just does so line by line as it executes instead of before execution starts and all at once. Do you think a CPU can understand bytecode?
That's a misinterpretation of "compiles". The interpreter executes the bytecode, but it is not producing an actual standalone executable binary of assembly code. If it did, why on earth would Java deployment always involve the added trouble of ensuring the Java interpreter were installed on target machines, and then have the interpreter execute the .JAR?
"Runtime 'compiling'" is called "interpreting," and it really shouldn't be confused with compiling.
Extreme is a reference to taking a best practice and applying it to the extreme. Extreme code reviews become pair programming. Extreme testing becomes TDD, with comprehensive coverage. Etc.
I'm the former tech lead/architect for the NPM CLI, now working for Microsoft on developer tooling. I do a lot of Rust open source stuff and some web dev.
I'm the former tech lead/architect for the NPM CLI, now working for Microsoft on developer tooling. I do a lot of Rust open source stuff and some web dev.
Humanist living the Colorado life, w/ a modicum of scripting experience. My background is across multiple industries (mostly contract work). Emotional intelligence > Artificial Intelligence
Maybe we should simply call it "likeness"? It might make the discussion around the whole term easier, because you can more easily explain why "likeness" leads to more reusability and less complexity.
It could also make the term more general and maybe even lead to other "likeness" patterns.
I feel like this whenever I learn anything about category theory. The words are so much fancier and more complicated sounding than the concepts, but...I guess we need to call 'em something.
I'm building Commonlounge.com, an educational platform with wiki-based short courses on Machine Learning, Web Development, UX/UI Design and many more topics!
I (Richard Bellman) 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 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.
=> (fat arrow ) means the math logic predicate "implies" rapidtables.com/math/symbols/Basic... it has nothing to do with function, what did the javascript commitee drink on that day or there was one guy using coffeescript who made that silly choice ;)
this in javascript is the confusion of a lot of javascript devs which is evident since it's not uncommon to see that = this or self = this (my personal favorite when I just started learning javascript.
Personally I think a really expressive keyword instead would of been invocationContext but that would be ugly to have everywhere so I would settle for context or ctx
I despise the names Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control, not because they're inaccurate, but because they're intimidating to the new developer and thus feel a bit inaccessible. Names like these foster impostor syndrome by being a bit too pretentious for something as simple as moving construction of an object to outside the object via constructor parameter.
And no... I don't have a better name, I just hate the ones we currently use.
I agree that inversion of control might not be the best name, mainly because it's too generic and can get confusing because of that. But what's wrong with dependency injection? It's literally telling what it does: you inject those dependencies from the outside instead of creating them yourself, and dependency is pretty self-explanatory.
There's much worse names out there than these, IMO.
I know, maybe I didn't explain myself. I don't see anything pretentious or intimidating about them. All technical fields are full of technical words and if the accuracy of the words is on point then I don't know what the problem with them is.
As currently used a lot in web development. It comes from reactive programming which is a form of data flow programming, generally a declarative programming principle.
In reactive programming when you have an expression like a = b + c the value of a will change when b and c change. Not just when the above expression is evaluated.
This important characteristic is commonly not the case in what is currently often called reactive. While a lot of frameworks have support for pushing/pulling and reacting to model changes, it is hardly used to set up a reactive system. It does not go beyond showing new data, and not reacting to it.
So, the system does have reactive properties, it not reactive programming. We have been building systems with reactive properties for years before the current reactive trend showed up.
That's a very good point. Unidirectional data flow is one way to achieve reactiveness and declarativeness, but it doesn't have to be like that. You can also write React in an imperative and non-reactive way, so why is it even called React?
I personally like a different reactive pattern more, namely, based on observed and computed variables (or independent and dependent variables if you want), similar maybe to MobX and the like.
In networking diagrams the "outside" network (usually the internet) is commonly shown as a cloud symbol. It is a network of unknown computers what can connect to your network. This symbolic is used as the basis of the term "cloud computing".
But it makes no sense. As the computers involved in cloud computing are known in your system design. They are named entities to and from which you connect. These computers might be dynamically allocated, and not yours. But this was also the case in large mainframe setups in "the old days".
Then use the term, "Cluster Computing." Cloud Computing was a term made up by non-programmers. Early books on Beowulfs use the analogy in the illustrations, but not in technical aspects.
Pretty much everything in programming could be named better.
class -> type
I think classes reap the greatest benefit from renaming them. It is not helpful to think of things are being in that "class", in the traditional sense of the word. And somehow this also makes people think of hierarchies of classes, but that is not the primary point of classes. They should be called types. The main advantage of classes, is you are not stuck with the types built into the language, you can make your own.
method -> operator
Another way in which classes are actually allowing you to make your own types is they allow you to define the "operators" that work with that type via methods. So methods should be called operators or operations. In existing languages, a type has operations you can perform on it, and that is basically what methods are. Even the order things appear in is the same: name of variable/value/object, operator/method, other variable/value/object if relevant.
object oriented programming (OOP) -> type oriented programming (TOP)
With that in mind, the form that object oriented programming has taken in modern languages like Kotlin and C#, would be better called type oriented programming, or TOP.
function -> action
Functions should be called actions, and a good keyword might be "act" or "action". I think the analogy to math is less helpful than just calling them actions.
variable -> box
A friend of mine was recently learning how to program. He was confused by variables at first, and then later asked why they are not just called boxes. While "variables" does make some sense, once again I think the analogy to math is not the most helpful thing, and "boxes" would be a better name.
I think calling them types makes a lot more sense than classes. But as for variables, I don't think "boxes" would be appropriate since generally, many variables can be aliases to a single object.
At first I didn't agree with what you said about variables, but after thinking about it for while, I think I do agree. Perhaps in the case of variables, the analogy to variables in an equation is pretty helpful. I'm still somewhat torn though. Variables in equations typically don't change values, wheres the value stored in a variable can change. Then again, that is mutable state, which is typically an anti-pattern. So maybe you are right.
Which works nothing like regular inheritance where the originator is both dead and no longer possesses the thing.
When we use the term for Java style classes it is really a conflagration of 3 concepts. DRY by sharing definitions of data shape,a specific form of polymorphism, and namespacing of behaviors to the data shapes they operate on.
None of those maps super well to inheritance it even to is...a relationships and is the source of much confusion
I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
Which works nothing like regular inheritance where the originator is both dead and no longer possesses the thing.
I find your definition of 'regular' inheritance interesting. It seems to completely ignore genetics, which is more likely to be where programming borrowed the term from than the legal concept.
I suppose I did, mostly because I'm thinking of Java/C++ as the prototype for inheritance and well...the generics story there is not great. I don't know that I've ever heard the term used specifically about generics though, what is the context you're thinking of?
I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
You inherit genetic traits from your parents. The exact term 'inheritance' isn't often used directly, but the verb 'inherit' is pretty common in discussions of classical genetics, and the concept of inheriting traits from some parent entity fits pretty well with the concept of inheritance in most programming languages.
Extreme came from the core tenet that if something is fundamentally good for producing software, that idea should be carried to its applicability limit.
The pair programming in Extreme Programming is the concept of code review pushed so far forward that it starts as the code is written.
Automated unit testing over unfinished products was once an extreme too. Some shops still do manual testing after the code is "complete", and would only automate after the manual testing became too expensive.
A variable creates a symbol that can bind to values but does not actually itself vary. And it typically uses the = syntax while not implying equality. Also most usages do not change the bound values so nothing varies
Abstract syntax trees are a result of parsing syntax, they are structures that have only the building blocks of the language with all the syntax stripped out.
Lisp sexp's have nothing to do with sex nor lisp with speech impediments
The No1 candidate that comes to my mind is monad. I know it's a mathematical concept, but I sometimes get the feeling that it is used to appear smart rather than being a precise definition of what is happening. Purely functional programming (hello haskell) can be a big thing to learn and I don't see the point in introducing unnecessary complexity to this, as it makes learning more intimidating.
The most misunderstood programming concept for beginners that if they learn programming,they can be like neo in matrix movies. But in reality, you cannot make more than 1 major product all by yourself. Even the computer (software is made apple, Microsoft etc) and hardware (cpu intel, amd , other parts by pc manufacturers )
Humanist living the Colorado life, w/ a modicum of scripting experience. My background is across multiple industries (mostly contract work). Emotional intelligence > Artificial Intelligence
My 2019 pet peeve is the new trend for all of these startups and corporations using "AI" And "Machine Learning" as a buzzword to churn profits.
AI has a very specific definition and use case. It's a concept, not a reality. There are no quantum, blockchain, machine learning compooters that perform magic. It takes a lot of hardware to run that level of IBM Watson-like software. Just like it takes a lot of wires to run a sufficient wireless network.
At the end of the day, it's all code and the nightmare that is Youtube's suggestion algorithms show that we are very far from some futuristic self-driving vehicle Facebook car.
I'm a quality hero, customer champion. Experienced software tester and newbie developer.
Okay, so I've actually been dabbling in code for a long time. I've just not gone very deep in any language .
I'm a quality hero, customer champion. Experienced software tester and newbie developer.
Okay, so I've actually been dabbling in code for a long time. I've just not gone very deep in any language .
One of the most salient features of our Tech Hiring culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.
In conversation 'closure' generally means ending something and putting it behind you, in Javascript it means almost the opposite. Very confusing to beginners.
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Response: 418 - I'm a teapot.
A student who loves programming a he is looking at many things at the same time (which probably is a bad idea, but he is happy)
I agree! I think "pull request" is the kind of terminology that comes from thinking about how the underlying technology works first, as opposed to thinking of a use-case from a typical programmer's point of view. Also, welcome to Dev!
DevOps. It's supposed to be about removing silos and different parts of the business working together - not just about developers having access to NewRelic...
"Clean" Code. It promotes cleanliness of code for its own sake, and pretends there is a subjective "clean" state of code. Thus I think it could be called somehow different.
I'm a web sysop and support engineer. My skills are mainly in back-end: Java, Linux, Python, PostgreSQL, Git, and GitLab. Currently I'm learning front-end skills: JavaScript, and Ruby.
A Front-End Developer with a passion for learning how people work, the efficacy of good design, and a growing interest in the complexities of functional programming.
JavaScript has nothing to do with Java.
I blew the designers' minds a few weeks ago with the "car and carnation" analogy 😅
I prefer Java is to JavaScript as car is to carpet. Just like there is some carpet in a car, there is some minor overlap, but they're totally different things.
There's also grape and grapefruit, they both are fruits but totally different ones.
taken from the r/learnprogramming faq
This is perfect because they're more similar to each other than either one is to, say, Haskell, so they're not totally unrelated.
I generally just tell people plainly that it was a marketing ploy and that they have nothing to do with each other aside from the fact that they are both programming languages.
Not directly programming, but relevant.
In asymmetric cryptography, we have the terms "private key" and "public key". But the term "private key" is actually wrong.
Since what academics call a "private key" is something that you don't reveal to anyone else, the term "private" is wrong.
It should be, therefore, "secret key" and "public key".
The "private key" should, instead, be what you agree on with e.g. Diffie-Hellman. It makes more sense than "shared secret".
It also allows you to use
skandpkas variable names in cryptography APIs, instead of having to spell outpubKeyandprivKeysince they both abbreviate topk.This is my weird hill okay?
Secret key is most used for simmetric schemas. I get your point, but I think using private-key is right.
The real epic-fail in cryptography is about the misused "certificate" term:
A certificate is just the public-key plus the proven subject (owner) of the certificate signed by a Certification Authority. The certificate has not the private key but we can find things like
"install the certificate in the web server to configure the TLS...." or "sign with a certificate"
From A Cipherpunk's Manifesto by Eric Hughes (1993):
Yes but... I can be wrong, I am not english native,... but I think privacy and private are not related , they seem to be but are indeed different and unrelated concepts, this is, a private key is not "something for keeping privacy" but "something for keeping confidentiality or secrets"...
Not sure at all about these...
Private is an adjective, privacy is a noun, but they refer to the same thing.
A private matter is one that requires privacy.
A secret matter is one that requires secrecy.
Shared key and private key achieve the same goal, without stepping on the historical meaning of secret key.
It’s not a fully “programming” concept but pull request on Github sounds weird for me
I 100% agree, GitLab calls them Merge Requests which is more accurate
Exactly! and you aren't really requesting to pull anything, if anything you are requesting to push something. Merge request sounds better but at the same time I've gotten so used to pull request even though it makes no sense
I guess it’s a request that the other person pull, right? But either way, merge request 100% better.
Oh truue, I didn't think about that. It's like a "hey i did a thing, can you please pull this into master?"
Still totally weird. I had the same confusion when first introduced.
Serverless is the most obvious. 🤦♂️
Also Object-Oriented Programming, it's inventor (Dr. Alan Kay) even said later in life that it should have been called message-oriented programming.
Scrolling through this list, I'm surprised "serverless" is like three-quarters of the way down. It's clearly the most glaring misnomer in recent programming memory.
Can you think of a better name for it? I think re: developer experience it's pretty fitting, since in practical terms it means not needing to set up, manage, maintain, or pay for a server (or even write any back-end code, depending on the implementation). It's not really accurate in technical terms of what's going on behind the curtain but I don't really think that's the point.
Infrastructure as a Service.
On-demand Computing.
idk, not serverless. :)
Doesn't have quite the same marketable ring to it, but not bad!
It's server-less (i.e. you have less than 100% of the server, and even less than you'd have with a VM) ;-)
darkgreyApparently, "compiled language". Nearly all languages are compiled in many situations to something, so it's a meaningless phrase.
"Interpreted language" (final result executed via some form of a software interpreter) vs. "assembled language" (final result executed directly by the CPU as machine code) is more useful. Python and Java are examples of interpreted languages, although both are compiled in some fashion. C++ and FORTRAN are examples of assembled languages.
And yes, the designations are murky. Interpreters exist for typically assembled languages, and (generally impractical) means exist to assemble typically interpreted languages to machine code.
EDIT: Based on this thread, I'll add one more: an interactive language is one that is primarily run through a REPL (interactive shell).
This should not be confused with an interpreted language, which simply has a software layer between the shipped files (sometimes, bytecode that was compiled to) and direct execution.
Also, dependencies don't even enter into this discussion; any language has to resolve them somehow on the target machine.
EDIT 2: This thread (and related conversations) led to this...
Compiled! An Unobfuscated Glossary
Jason C. McDonald ・ Sep 6 ・ 13 min read
But Java is assembled to machine code at runtime, and it's extremely practical. I'd say interpreting Java is impractically slow!
No, Java is not assembled to machine code at any point, except in extraordinary implementations. It is compiled to bytecode, which is what is run through the interpreter, often the JVM.
EDIT: I omitted two words by mistake: at any point before shipping. JIT-compiling is pretty typical for interpreted languages; it doesn't make it an assembled language. So, yes, runtime still counts (towards interpreted.) My bad.
This was discussed and rehashed in some detail here:
What Is An "Interpreted" Language?
Jason C. McDonald ・ Sep 1 ・ 3 min read
No, common implementations do it. Run Java with
-XX:+UnlockDiagnosticVMOptions -XX:+PrintAssemblyto see it assemble your Java code to machine code.Here's the assembler in HotSpot for example github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/openjdk-jd....
And see this blog post about how another Java compiler compiles and assembles Java to machine code chrisseaton.com/truffleruby/jokerc....
I used to work at Oracle on compilers and assemblers for Java and other languages.
I'm sorry, but this is just plainly incorrect. Even an interpreter compiles down to machine code before execution, it just does so line by line as it executes instead of before execution starts and all at once. Do you think a CPU can understand bytecode?
That's a misinterpretation of "compiles". The interpreter executes the bytecode, but it is not producing an actual standalone executable binary of assembly code. If it did, why on earth would Java deployment always involve the added trouble of ensuring the Java interpreter were installed on target machines, and then have the interpreter execute the .JAR?
"Runtime 'compiling'" is called "interpreting," and it really shouldn't be confused with compiling.
Extreme Programming. It is about valuing the people on your team, and working effectively together, that is far from Extreme.
haha, I guess "extreme" is a commentary on historical common practices. We even pay extra hours here!, and no whips!, even water to drink!, extreeme!
Extreme is a reference to taking a best practice and applying it to the extreme. Extreme code reviews become pair programming. Extreme testing becomes TDD, with comprehensive coverage. Etc.
Map.
Literally every single different definition. I can think of three that programmers run into, off the top of my head.
I personally don't think Map is a wrong name.
macmillandictionary.com/dictionary...
The problem is, "which map?" If I'm talking about Maps, am I talking about:
map()The problem is that
mapis so unspecific in our field, there's a lot of ambiguity and that can lead to confusion.Map: Pooh Bear
Cartography: i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/origin...
There's a server in serverless.
Correct!
I always felt like "polymorphism" was an unnecessarily complex word for what it really is 🤣
I guess it's not inaccurate - just overly confusing.
Maybe we should simply call it "likeness"? It might make the discussion around the whole term easier, because you can more easily explain why "likeness" leads to more reusability and less complexity.
It could also make the term more general and maybe even lead to other "likeness" patterns.
I feel like this whenever I learn anything about category theory. The words are so much fancier and more complicated sounding than the concepts, but...I guess we need to call 'em something.
Dynamic Programming.
Backstory:
Source: goodreads.com/book/show/5049990-ey...
=> (fat arrow ) means the math logic predicate "implies" rapidtables.com/math/symbols/Basic... it has nothing to do with function, what did the javascript commitee drink on that day or there was one guy using coffeescript who made that silly choice ;)
By the Curry Howard correspondence, logical implication and function types are related. But I doubt that is the rational for the fat arrow.
Don't look now, but PHP...
thisin javascript is the confusion of a lot of javascript devs which is evident since it's not uncommon to seethat = thisorself = this (my personal favorite when I just started learning javascript.Personally I think a really expressive keyword instead would of been
invocationContextbut that would be ugly to have everywhere so I would settle forcontextorctxthat = thisis actually generally used for referencing athisin another scope.It creates really annoying code to read. But it's useful, here's an example off of stack overflow.
stackoverflow.com/questions/163611...
An object comparison methods like equals(...), I use if (this.equals(that)) and it seems quite readable.
Self.equals(other) doesn't sound as good to my ears
I despise the names Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control, not because they're inaccurate, but because they're intimidating to the new developer and thus feel a bit inaccessible. Names like these foster impostor syndrome by being a bit too pretentious for something as simple as moving construction of an object to outside the object via constructor parameter.
And no... I don't have a better name, I just hate the ones we currently use.
I agree that inversion of control might not be the best name, mainly because it's too generic and can get confusing because of that. But what's wrong with dependency injection? It's literally telling what it does: you inject those dependencies from the outside instead of creating them yourself, and dependency is pretty self-explanatory.
There's much worse names out there than these, IMO.
My concerns as stated weren't around the accuracy of the names.
I know, maybe I didn't explain myself. I don't see anything pretentious or intimidating about them. All technical fields are full of technical words and if the accuracy of the words is on point then I don't know what the problem with them is.
Auto-wiring might be better? What do you think?
For IoC yeah, that or just provider container.
For DI, I think you could still say constructor / parameter / property injection, possibly. Maybe instead of DI you call it a "decoupling pattern".
Either way, our current names are here to stay, I just wish they induced less anxiety to those who don't understand them yet.
I find Inversion Of Control (IOC) to be too abstract and, as a result, confusing.
Also a 'Bean' is a confusing concept in Java world for newcomers. It seems that the name has nothing to do with reallity.
Nerds like to run with the themes. See: almost anything in Ruby or Python. Also see: the Cucumber ecosystem.
The word "bean" in programming needs to die. I'm all for puns, but this one was taken wayyyyy too far.
Reducer function.
Is not completly wrong, you can actually use it to "reduce" something, but the name implies some sort of limitation that isn't there.
Swift and Obj-C have
protocols whereas literally every other language hasinterfaces.React(ive).
As currently used a lot in web development. It comes from reactive programming which is a form of data flow programming, generally a declarative programming principle.
In reactive programming when you have an expression like
a = b + cthe value ofawill change whenbandcchange. Not just when the above expression is evaluated.This important characteristic is commonly not the case in what is currently often called reactive. While a lot of frameworks have support for pushing/pulling and reacting to model changes, it is hardly used to set up a reactive system. It does not go beyond showing new data, and not reacting to it.
So, the system does have reactive properties, it not reactive programming. We have been building systems with reactive properties for years before the current reactive trend showed up.
That's a very good point. Unidirectional data flow is one way to achieve reactiveness and declarativeness, but it doesn't have to be like that. You can also write React in an imperative and non-reactive way, so why is it even called React?
I personally like a different reactive pattern more, namely, based on observed and computed variables (or independent and dependent variables if you want), similar maybe to MobX and the like.
Cloud computing.
In networking diagrams the "outside" network (usually the internet) is commonly shown as a cloud symbol. It is a network of unknown computers what can connect to your network. This symbolic is used as the basis of the term "cloud computing".
But it makes no sense. As the computers involved in cloud computing are known in your system design. They are named entities to and from which you connect. These computers might be dynamically allocated, and not yours. But this was also the case in large mainframe setups in "the old days".
Then use the term, "Cluster Computing." Cloud Computing was a term made up by non-programmers. Early books on Beowulfs use the analogy in the illustrations, but not in technical aspects.
Agreed, El Muerte! I'm on a cloud project now, and have to find a way for the name to stop irking me.
Pretty much everything in programming could be named better.
class -> type
I think classes reap the greatest benefit from renaming them. It is not helpful to think of things are being in that "class", in the traditional sense of the word. And somehow this also makes people think of hierarchies of classes, but that is not the primary point of classes. They should be called types. The main advantage of classes, is you are not stuck with the types built into the language, you can make your own.
method -> operator
Another way in which classes are actually allowing you to make your own types is they allow you to define the "operators" that work with that type via methods. So methods should be called operators or operations. In existing languages, a type has operations you can perform on it, and that is basically what methods are. Even the order things appear in is the same: name of variable/value/object, operator/method, other variable/value/object if relevant.
object oriented programming (OOP) -> type oriented programming (TOP)
With that in mind, the form that object oriented programming has taken in modern languages like Kotlin and C#, would be better called type oriented programming, or TOP.
function -> action
Functions should be called actions, and a good keyword might be "act" or "action". I think the analogy to math is less helpful than just calling them actions.
variable -> box
A friend of mine was recently learning how to program. He was confused by variables at first, and then later asked why they are not just called boxes. While "variables" does make some sense, once again I think the analogy to math is not the most helpful thing, and "boxes" would be a better name.
I think calling them types makes a lot more sense than classes. But as for variables, I don't think "boxes" would be appropriate since generally, many variables can be aliases to a single object.
At first I didn't agree with what you said about variables, but after thinking about it for while, I think I do agree. Perhaps in the case of variables, the analogy to variables in an equation is pretty helpful. I'm still somewhat torn though. Variables in equations typically don't change values, wheres the value stored in a variable can change. Then again, that is mutable state, which is typically an anti-pattern. So maybe you are right.
Inheritance.
Which works nothing like regular inheritance where the originator is both dead and no longer possesses the thing.
When we use the term for Java style classes it is really a conflagration of 3 concepts. DRY by sharing definitions of data shape,a specific form of polymorphism, and namespacing of behaviors to the data shapes they operate on.
None of those maps super well to inheritance it even to is...a relationships and is the source of much confusion
I find your definition of 'regular' inheritance interesting. It seems to completely ignore genetics, which is more likely to be where programming borrowed the term from than the legal concept.
I suppose I did, mostly because I'm thinking of Java/C++ as the prototype for inheritance and well...the generics story there is not great. I don't know that I've ever heard the term used specifically about generics though, what is the context you're thinking of?
You inherit genetic traits from your parents. The exact term 'inheritance' isn't often used directly, but the verb 'inherit' is pretty common in discussions of classical genetics, and the concept of inheriting traits from some parent entity fits pretty well with the concept of inheritance in most programming languages.
Microservices.
Extreme came from the core tenet that if something is fundamentally good for producing software, that idea should be carried to its applicability limit.
The pair programming in Extreme Programming is the concept of code review pushed so far forward that it starts as the code is written.
Automated unit testing over unfinished products was once an extreme too. Some shops still do manual testing after the code is "complete", and would only automate after the manual testing became too expensive.
A variable creates a symbol that can bind to values but does not actually itself vary. And it typically uses the = syntax while not implying equality. Also most usages do not change the bound values so nothing varies
Abstract syntax trees are a result of parsing syntax, they are structures that have only the building blocks of the language with all the syntax stripped out.
Lisp sexp's have nothing to do with sex nor lisp with speech impediments
The No1 candidate that comes to my mind is monad. I know it's a mathematical concept, but I sometimes get the feeling that it is used to appear smart rather than being a precise definition of what is happening. Purely functional programming (hello haskell) can be a big thing to learn and I don't see the point in introducing unnecessary complexity to this, as it makes learning more intimidating.
The most misunderstood programming concept for beginners that if they learn programming,they can be like neo in matrix movies. But in reality, you cannot make more than 1 major product all by yourself. Even the computer (software is made apple, Microsoft etc) and hardware (cpu intel, amd , other parts by pc manufacturers )
My 2019 pet peeve is the new trend for all of these startups and corporations using "AI" And "Machine Learning" as a buzzword to churn profits.
AI has a very specific definition and use case. It's a concept, not a reality. There are no quantum, blockchain, machine learning compooters that perform magic. It takes a lot of hardware to run that level of IBM Watson-like software. Just like it takes a lot of wires to run a sufficient wireless network.
At the end of the day, it's all code and the nightmare that is Youtube's suggestion algorithms show that we are very far from some futuristic self-driving vehicle Facebook car.
Object Oriented Programming
But it uses class
Backwards compatibility is really about forward portability.
But are you porting something forward or are you making something new that has to be compatible with something old?
This has been your unsolicited confusing question of the day.
Lambda functions. Reminds me of Math.
It is. For some amazing fun, see youtu.be/FITJMJjASUs
We say "refactoring" we mean "rewriting".
E.g much refactoring work is done to solve a problem, and make improvements. But refactoring wouldn't change result's.
Refactor is a math thing, iirc. bobobobo.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/...
Yes indeed!
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML): XML is not a requirement though to implement AJAX.
Social media. Being social and being on Facebook/Twitter are polar opposites
In conversation 'closure' generally means ending something and putting it behind you, in Javascript it means almost the opposite. Very confusing to beginners.
Not a concept but a command, Git's
checkouthas never made sense to me.Serverless
Serverless, they running into a server yet the name no make sense.
Vue should be called React because it's truly reactive, and React should be called Vue because it's only concerned with the view
I'm-not-even-mad-thats-amazing.jpg
I've always thought that 'push request' seems more intuitive than 'pull request'
I agree! I think "pull request" is the kind of terminology that comes from thinking about how the underlying technology works first, as opposed to thinking of a use-case from a typical programmer's point of view. Also, welcome to Dev!
"Call by name" parameter passing. Thank goodness it isn't used much. It should be called "macro parameter" or "call with macro"
Deprecation. Oftentimes people mistake "removed" for "deprecated".
Programme.
The word is derived from the ancient Greek for "public notice". Proprietary software is not public 😛
DevOps. It's supposed to be about removing silos and different parts of the business working together - not just about developers having access to NewRelic...
Generics was always weird to me.
They are really "Parameterized Types" if you ask me.
What about Logistic Regression?
I hate that React Hooks were namely thusly so, so much.
Why? Aren't they hooking up to certain events / actions?
MVC in PHP is not really related to the original.
"Clean" Code. It promotes cleanliness of code for its own sake, and pretends there is a subjective "clean" state of code. Thus I think it could be called somehow different.
"Full stack developer". Hardly anyone is a "full stack developer". Does one person really specialize in all 7 OSI layers?
Generics make the Types of Object method Arguments Specific instead of un-typed
milosophical.me/blog/2008/09/10/ge...
Dependency Injection.
Simply because people have widely differing opinions on what actually comprises DI.
Great blog post! If you’ve ever wondered about color blindness, this color blind test is a great tool.
"Senior Developer" because most, aren't.
debugging
Comes from the days when computers were large enough that you literally had to remove bugs from them.