These terms are so frustrating because they have "consistently wrong intuitive semantics" (I don't know better term). They are like cognitive puns.
It's so easy to guess their meaning consistently wrong that people don't brother to look them up. When several people wrongly guess the semantics wrong exactly the same way and talk to each other, new meaning is established.
It's not uncommon to have office debate of the difference where 9 people are sure that they know the right definition and the one person who argues for the right definition can't convince them.
EDIT: there are already at least two comments that argue that the wrong definition is the right definition. These guys feel so strongly that their definition is right that nothing convinces them and people agree. It's a hopeless pursuit to get this right.
> It's so easy to guess their meaning consistently wrong that people don't brother to look them up.
I find this to be the source of most programmers' confusion about most topics. Sometimes I spend hours arguing trying to convince someone that X works one way, because I've read the spec and the source code, while they believe that X works a different way, because they looked at its name and used it that way last time.
It's so easy to guess their meaning consistently wrong that people don't brother to look them up. When several people wrongly guess the semantics wrong exactly the same way and talk to each other, new meaning is established.
It's not uncommon to have office debate of the difference where 9 people are sure that they know the right definition and the one person who argues for the right definition can't convince them.
EDIT: there are already at least two comments that argue that the wrong definition is the right definition. These guys feel so strongly that their definition is right that nothing convinces them and people agree. It's a hopeless pursuit to get this right.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/373419/whats-the-differe...