It's just like utilize. Crotchety old folks will bitch and moan that it is not a real word and unnecessary in any event, but the world will ignore them and use the words it wants to use. English is a living language, and sometimes that means it suffers from unsightly warts.
There's a distinction between completely useless, bogus words which duplicate the functionality of existing ones and new words which convey some new meaning (e.g. bromance).
It's surprising that in the world of programming, in which precision is essential, there are so many advocates for cruftiness in English.
It's surprising in the world of programming, in which precision is essential, there are so many advocates for cruftiness in English.
In programming, precision is essential. In human communication, it is often inconsequential. We sped our time railing against our arbitrary and fickle natures, demanding precisely worded specification, imposing workflow and permissions straightjackets on programs, when in reality all that matters is that people feel happy when they use what we build.
If someone feels happy saying the words "performant" and "utilize" to me, that is enough.
Remove all synonyms
Example: fine -> good
Remove antonyms and just negate the word
Example: bad -> ungood
Remove special-case nouns: just combine a noun and one or more adjectives to reach the same meaning with fewer fundamental words.
Example: great -> doubleplusgood; murder -> collateral damage
We could call this doubleplusgood language newspeak.
It's surprising that in the world of programming, in which precision is essential, there are so many advocates for cruftiness in English.
Boy would you not like my code. It's full of neologisms. Undivify. Wipeage. Calcval. Zillions of them! I'd say this makes my code better English, not worse. I choose words carefully and do not hesitate to make a new one if existing ones don't communicate just what is wanted. It's not an arbitrary process and has nothing to do with sloppiness or vanity. It has to do with making the language fit the problem.
Oh, and I use "performant" all the time, too. What other adjective signifies the qualities that programmers have in mind when they say "performance"?
It's an aesthetic argument. If you make your constraint tight enough, you're forced into concocting a new word to fix some imagined failing of the existing language. We don't need an adjective that signifies performance and we also don't need an adjective that signifies performance that starts with "perform".
Instead, you can rearrange the wording a little to convey the exact same meaning. By working within the constraints, an elegant solution emerges. By all means add words if they are clever or pleasing or convey a nuance that can't be achieved with what already exists. Performant and functionality don't meet those criteria.
I would say that "performant" is a narrower term than "efficient", so no, the two don't coincide.
This whole argument is silly, of course. Natural language is so heavily overloaded that you could never regularize it in the way people seem to be proposing, and if you could, you would ruin it.
The meaning is obvious to me, although I've never seen it before. What would be a good real word to use instead? ("Efficient", "effective", "harmonious" all seem a bit off. "High performance" almost makes sense, but it's not comparable, you can't say "more high performance".)
