Five Dollar Programming Words

My favourite five dollar word has to be ‘sucky sucky’

Contiguous

Really? I thought blogging was supposed to replace dead tree venues for attaining knowledge. I think that idea is close to being resoundly disproven. Is it ironic that you’re using (or actually quoting someone else, as always) using the phrase Five dollar word which is really just another anti-intellectual epithet? I don’t know anymore.

I think mine is covariance, discovered when I was looking for an explanation of why casting from ListT to ListU where T is a subclass of U doesn’t work as I had naively expected in C#. Apparently something like this is in the works for C# 4.0, though.

Speaking of Eric Lippert, he had a whole series about this: http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2007/10/16/covariance-and-contravariance-in-c-part-one.aspx

It was Classes for me :-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_(computer_science)

I’ll go with SOLID, though the nitpickers may either dock me for choosing an acronym and say this is a $1 word, or perhaps applaud the choice and credit me for $25. Regardless, you can’t go wrong following these guidelines.

http://butunclebob.com/ArticleS.UncleBob.PrinciplesOfOod and see also the SOLID Screencasts at http://unhandled-exceptions.com/blog/

Mine are the four words that make up the ACID acronym - Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability.

I’m with BobF - it had to be Objects … I remember being completely clueless and struggling through Basic, C, Turbo Pascal, C++ … and then discovering Object magazine at the local newsstand. It took me 2 years of reading before I really got it.

My suggestion is deprecation, deprecate or any of the variations. Usefully but try to use it in a meeting; they could of used obsolete and made it easier for managers.

I think this is a good $5 word along the lines of idempotent:

Inverse. Two functions f and g are inverses if g(f(x))=x. Common example in programming is a pair of functions decode and encode or decrypt and encrypt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_function

My favourite one is SEMANTIC. It pops up everywhere and makes me really think about what I want to do with the code I’m writing

Two of them. They are even pretty common.
Indirection and abstraction.

These are so fundamental, so powerful, so common.
But there’s a common level of programmer who doesn’t know either… and those are doomed to remain scriptmonkeys forever.

I’d have to go with Mission Critical (yes, I know it’s two words) or, even more impressively, Enterprise.

Jeff -

A linguist might be interested in comparing the frequency of words used in .ppt files versus words in a standard (e.g., newspaper) corpus. I suspect words like refactor, instantiation, and use-cases would be severely over-represented. Once (non-techincal) managers adopt technical words, they lose their original meanings, and may be used to explain anything.

BTW, now you’re a Dad: Noone Asks My Baby’s Leakage Average.

  • Lepto

I actually used the words domain and range yesterday, discussing a web service that accepted and returned xml in a certain format. A web service is a function.

overspend

monotonic - values must be monotonically increasing
hysteresis/equilibrium - feedback loop to manage data queue depth
reentrant - not quite the same as thread-safe

I’m not sure if I understand the first definition of idempotent. Are you saying that if foo is a function, then x is idempotent under foo if

x == foo(x)?

After some brief searching I’ve not been able to find any other source that defines idempotent this way. (Not saying that this isn’t a valid definition, but it doesn’t seem to be standard).

Is it possible this definition is being confused with that of an idempotent element of a binary operation bar,

x == bar(x,x)?

Jeff:
your interpretation of idempotent conflicts with the quote you used to describe it.

the quote says: f(x) = f(f(x))

you equated idempotence with the value of a function depending only on its inputs (functional).

Mine was Bikeshedding