
New Programming Jargon - DanielRibeiro
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jargon.html
======
SiVal
I can't help noticing how often I've

\-- had a programming question

\-- googled it

\-- found the very first (most relevant) link to be to StackOverflow

\-- jumped to it

\-- found that some other programmer had also asked the same question

\-- found that other SO members had given the question and its answers
hundreds of bonus points (useful!)

\-- and found that the SO mod-nazis had shut it down as "Not considered a
good, on-topic question"

An example might be, what are the differences between git and mercurial, where
the answer is not a line of code but may include informed judgments by the
people whose judgments I'm most interested in. As a developer, I have to make
a lot of decisions, and not all of them are about which characters to type.

So I have to live with whatever answers well-informed SO members managed to
sneak onto the page before they were chased away and the gate was locked.

Does it seem to anyone else as though there might be something wrong when this
happens over and over again?

~~~
codinghorror
+1 for providing an example, but "Git vs. Mercurial" belongs on someone's
blog, or on Wikipedia as a comparison matrix.

Now if you have a specific question about some _aspect_ of Git compared to
Mercurial, that can work on SE. But as a broad kitchen sink, catch-all,
"compare these two giant things kthx", you'd end up with Gorilla vs. Shark.

<http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/gorilla-vs-shark/>

~~~
rwmj
This reminds me of Wikipedia deletionism, as if either Wikipedia or Stack
Overflow will run out of space and they'll have to move into a new building if
they don't clear out these topics. Why not just keep them and keep getting the
Google ranking and free advertising?

~~~
dbecker
Joel recently tweeted something to the extent "You think you should have the
right to ask anything. The fact that we don't allow that is why your happy
when SO shows up in your google search."

------
rickmb
Every time when people get to rule their own kingdom and get to decide what's
Right(TM) and Wrong(TM) this is what happens.

It doesn't matter if it's informative, useful or, oh horror of horrors,
_entertaining_ , all that matters is that it is Right(TM) or Wrong(TM) in the
eyes of those high on their power trip, and there is no point in debating it.

And no Jeff, most communities don't just tend towards increased strictness
over time, they tend towards _death and abandonment_ , no matter how big they
were at the height of their popularity. Stifling the natural development of a
community because it doesn't match your "vision" rarely works out well, both
online and IRL.

------
nickm12
Such a strange post. Jeff spend the first half arguing that the qualify of the
second half somehow decrease the quality of Stack Overflow. I liked the second
half better.

I've never understood why Jeff and Joel felt these kinds of questions should
be anathema on Stack Overflow. Most of the information on Stack Overflow
exists in some form or other elsewhere. The value-add that Stack Overflow
provides is community-based filtering and maintenance. Not only are these
questions entertaining in their own right, but their very existence enhances
the feeling of community on the site.

Also, it wasn't as though they were using some off-the-shelf software to run
the site. They could have provided an outlet for this kind of thing, which all
communities want to do, within the context of the site.

------
SeanDav
I still think StackOverflow is one of the best sites out there for programming
and development information, but I am increasingly finding that the posts that
attracted me to StackOverflow in the first place are closed as not
constructive by SO mods. These posts, almost inevitably have a significant
number of replies and discussion.

I actually think that it is rude and disrespectful to your community to shut a
topic down that has nothing blatantly wrong with it (like
flaming/cussing/banality) just because it isn't the correct "fit" and might
(shocker) involve an opinion.

I can't help wondering that if SO continues in this vein, how relevant it is
going to be in the near future.

~~~
username3
Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange should promote good questions instead of
closing or deleting questions.

 _we don't have a good designated place for deleted "too fun" questions to
live_

Make a good designated place for deleted "too fun" questions to live!
StackOverflowOverflow.

------
dionidium
These bits are too silly for the internet, so we're going to move them over
here to this other part of the internet.

Sigh. This deletionism accomplishes nothing.

~~~
codinghorror
There's a reason the frat house isn't in the middle of the classroom on most
college campuses. Because it'd interfere with learning.

Frat row is, y'know, _over there_. Slightly off campus.

~~~
billforsternz
Oh boy Jeff, I love your work, but you are so way off beam with this one. The
over zealous moderation of StackOverflow is _insane_ and it's killing the
site. Seriously. If the community votes up questions and/or the answers to
those questions, then that is all the indication you need that the material
has real value and should not be shut down. You've just proved it yourself.
There's a ton of educational value in the material you've reposted. The fact
that there's comedic and entertainment value also is just a lovely bonus. And
you think deleting this is the right thing to do ? Really ? Please rethink
this before it's too late.

~~~
codinghorror
I disagree. Seeing that someone uses "banana banana banana" as a comment
placeholder, or that they refer to clueless programmers as "Jimmy"... is not
illuminating my day to day work at all.

Entertaining? Sure.

~~~
drumdance
I guess it depends on the use case. I never "hang out" on StackOverflow
(though maybe I should). I find it through Google, so I never see the non-
sequitur posts. I had no idea that content like that even existed there.
Knowing that you guys have posts like that is so great for the brand.

------
marquis
Since the men get Mad Girlfriend and Hooker Code, I'd like to add 'Old Boys
Club': libraries that you will never for the life of you get to work on modern
operating systems and force you to stay on Python 2.4.

~~~
etfb
An author who has the bad taste and poor judgement to publicise concepts like
the "Mad Girlfriend Bug" doesn't have the right to legislate good taste and
good judgement anywhere, even on a website he runs. It's automatic
disqualification, no appeal.

~~~
lmm
Then enjoy living in a stack overflow-less world, since that's what we'd have
if we followed your rules.

------
mgkimsal
NADS - Non-Authoritative Data Source - a condition where there are multiple
sources for the same piece of data, usually manifesting itself via the same
data existing in 2 Access files and 3 different Excel files continually
emailed around between people over years.

------
RegEx
"Yoda Conditions" takes the cake. It's pretty interesting how a commutative
operation such as `==` still has certain conventions. Then again, `==` isn't
guaranteed to be commutative in Ruby, since it can be overridden (which I'm
not a big fan of).

~~~
BadassFractal
Can't stand Yoda conditions, although I'm sure someone somewhere has an
explanation why they're so good for me.

~~~
dllthomas
if(x = 3)

if(3 = x)

If you make a habit of making the left side of == immutable, the compiler will
let you know when you type = instead. Of course, gcc throws a warning unless
you type if((x = 3)) if you genuinely want to do the assignment inside the if,
which works just as well but requires tool support.

~~~
DHowett
What tool support does it require? I certainly hope there are no tools
generating assignments in conditional expressions, and the only other tools
that need to support it clearly understand parentheses.

~~~
dllthomas
The warning itself is dependent on your compiler squawking when it sees "if(x
= 5)". The C spec doesn't require this. On the other hand, "if(5 = x)" will be
thrown out by any C compiler.

------
civilian
I really liked:

headlessCamels and ProudCamels for verbally differentiating between the two
different types of camelCase (or CamelCase)

(which was in the extended scrape of the original question:
[http://www.stackprinter.com/export?question=2349378&serv...](http://www.stackprinter.com/export?question=2349378&service=stackoverflow)
)

~~~
eridius
I prefer CamelCase vs dromedaryCase.

------
martinrd
I rubber duck A LOT. But instead of talking to a rubber duck, I talk to my
girlfriend (we both work at home). It's an amazingly useful technique.

This also reminds me of a House M.D. episode where House is on a plane without
his team, so he has to get a regular person to talk to, to finally solve the
case.

~~~
nsns
Interesting fact about "rubberducking": orignally a Hollywood slang for
explaining a character's psychological background as an alibi for everything
it does ("Someone took his rubber duck when he was little, so now he kills
people"). There's a good explanation in Sidney Lumet's _Making Movies_.

------
wangweij
I am not a native English speaker, can someone explain what "Counterbug (a bug
you present when presented with a bug caused by the person presenting the
bug)" means?

~~~
danparsonson
I am a native English speaker and I'm having considerable trouble parsing that
:-)

I think the idea is: you report a bug in code that I wrote, and I (childishly)
retaliate by reporting a bug in code that you wrote (the bug I report is then
a 'Counterbug')

~~~
MisterMerkin
Right. Think counter-terrorism.

------
joshsegall
One from my workplace is "potato" as in "extremely low hanging fruit",
features so easy and cheap to implement it's just like picking them up off the
ground.

------
malkia
Pokemon exceptions - our level editor embraces them :)

The result is, if something goes wrong, all you get is grayness, what follows
is run Visual Studio, reproduce the bug, make sure that now catches exceptions
before you, and hope it's not a heisenbug...

------
wayne62682
The big problem is there isn't any place to have a legit open discussion about
IT things. Ever since Joel closed the old JoS board (due to him demanding
everyone sign up), there isn't a place to shoot the shit. Half the questions
that used to be asked on JoS aren't allowed on SO, and their black and white
attitude towards what the site is and isn't makes it feel very unfriendly if
you ask something that isn't on-topic, you get it closed without even being
pointed to a better site, it's literally just telling you to GTFO and slamming
the door in your face.

------
vhf
Looks like English language is adapting to problems it wasn't made for. :)

------
satyap
I wanted to forward this to someone non-technical (a product manager, actually
the CEO of this tiny startup I help with) and found myself explaining the yoda
conditional, and then I wrote stuff about spectacular versus subtle failure,
and the whole thing turned into a small blog post:
<http://www.thesatya.com/blog/2012/08/yoda_conditions.html>

------
sidcool
Just when I think Jeff has written one of his best posts ever, he comes up
with something even more interesting. Well done Jeff.

~~~
Ralith
He hardly came up with the content of this post--just copied it from a deleted
SO question.

~~~
codinghorror
There are two parts. The meta part, which is "why is this deleted? should it
have been deleted? can you reasonably expect anyone to learn from this
question? what happens when a site is overrun with questions like this one?"

And then the content, which is a mirror of the deleted question.

Pick whichever part interests you.

~~~
Ralith
I don't mean to imply that you didn't author anything of value in the post.
The meta was certainly of interest. I'd just hesitate to call a few paragraphs
of discussion of the reasons behind SO's moderation your "best post ever."

Come to think of it, I wouldn't call an array of proposed/observed novel
jargon that either, regardless of its source.

~~~
codinghorror
Believe me, I have serious issues with the "top N funny things" sorts of
content that rules the web, and that is reflected in the design of Stack
Exchange.

At the same time, I am torn, because you can learn a little bit from content
like this. And the audience loves it. If we didn't have any systems in place
to tamp down on poll/survey/opinion questions, Stack Overflow would be
virtually nothing but those kinds of question. They are INSANELY popular.

~~~
derefr
How about an extra core site that isn't required to follow the "every question
only exists to educate those who end up finding it through Google" pattern of
the rest of the StackExchange network, but simply serves as a StackExchange-
powered community forum? Of course, It would only really make sense if whole
topics could be pushed there with all their comments and votes intact;
otherwise it would just be a ghetto to shove overly-gregarious users into.

------
wayne62682
The problem is when the question is closed and there isn't even any "Ask it
here" type of answer it's just gtfo we don't want your kind. Ever since Joel
shut down the old JoS board there has been NO good place just to discuss
programming/IT things. The whole concept of SO is flawed because it encourages
black and white answers, not discussion!

------
freditup
Hee hee, I'm a fan of #8:

8\. Heisenbug Source: Unknown A computer bug that disappears or alters its
characteristics when an attempt is made to study it.

On the other note - I personally think most online communities tend to get
more lenient overtime. I'd be interested in any further reading on that
matter.

~~~
thaumaturgy
"Heisenbug" as a term has been around for a while. It's one of my favorites,
too -- despite referring to possibly my least favorite part of programming.

Timing-related errors make the worst heisenbugs. I had one once where pausing
through the code caused the code to work, so I cobbled together a quick debug
logging facility for it, and that still caused the code to work just fine.
Anything that altered the code by more than a few milliseconds of execution
time caused it to work OK.

I stared at it for a while and then rewrote the entire block in disgust.

~~~
freditup
I hadn't heard it before, but it's a great term!

I know one multiplayer Flash service has a problem where their server clocks
had drifted apart, and it caused all sorts of crazy issues. Took them a couple
of weeks to figure it out and fix the problem. Not quite a Heisenbug maybe,
but close. ([http://playerio.com/forum/multiplayer/room-disappears-
from-l...](http://playerio.com/forum/multiplayer/room-disappears-from-list-
while-still-active-t33960))

I've had bugs before that have seemed to come and go for absolutely no reason
- I think they involved corrupted incremental compilations, but who knows.

------
sophacles
Just the other day, I was struggling to concisely explain the problem with a
system I've been tasked with rewriting. (The question was why are we not
reusing X, Y and Z?). If only I'd read about baklava code that day.

------
feralmoan
copypastas? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1332817> tisk tisk.

~~~
freditup
I think both articles are just pretty much copied from the now hidden Stack
Overflow question.

------
nathancahill
What's the lingo for a user that doesn't understand or can't follow the
instructions from a techie? It's an error number, I forget which.

~~~
krzysz00
It's an ID10T error, though (IIRC) it's more tech supprot/sysadmin jargon.

~~~
nathancahill
Thanks!

------
codyromano
Very funny. Pokémon exception handling is my favorite.

------
dos1
I'm not sure why SO feels the need to delete posts like this. I get that the
"question" isn't keeping with their stated objectives, but I find the answers
to be enlightening in some respects. I've learned about many new technologies
and frameworks from the "What is the best X to use for Y" questions that get
posted frequently. I don't see those as detrimental to the community like the
SO mods apparently do.

~~~
cloverich
Pedantry is inevitable when programmers are in charge ^^

Seriously though, there's not a good argument for deleting it. There are
_plenty_ of terrible, off-topic, garbage questions on there to be closed. Why
focus the few that, while probably off-format, result in entertaining (and
sometimes) enlightening results? Sure, if the site was _flooded_ with posts
like that, then maybe. Maybe.

But its not. Its just one group deciding to be pedantic. Nothing more.

~~~
codinghorror
Two reasons. 1) broken windows and 2) opportunity cost. It's like Kudzu: the
more you allow, the more there will be, because it grows like a weed and it is
insanely popular.

------
wissler
coffee mug bug: a bug you could have found by talking to your coffee mug
rather than enlisting someone else's help.

