Programming Jargon Dictionary
Posted by bsstahl on 2011-06-20 and Filed Under: development
StackOverflow has a fantastic list of programming terms that have been coined by the development community recently. Some of the best, most appropriate terms are documented below.
Automanually Used to refer to a batch job or application that should be scheduled or triggered automatically, but due to unspecified reasons requires manual intervention every time. (not the same as automagically)
Boolean Zen The proper practice of using boolean expressions directly without testing for equality to true or false.
Common Law Feature A bug in the application that has existed for so long that it is now part of the expected functionality.
Disaster Driven Development When Your PMs and salesmen promised that You will build a "space shuttle" in one month.
Egyptian Brackets Describes the god-awful c-style where curly-braces are not aligned.
Heisenbug An oldie, but still valuable…describes a bug that disappears or changes when put under scrutiny.
Higgs-Bugson A hypothetical bug predicted to exist based on a small number of possibly related event log entries and other anecdotal evidence.
Hindenbug A catastrophic, data destroying bug.
Jimmy A non-inclusive name for a low-level developer (n00b). (note: all non-inclusive language is inappropriate and should not be used)
Nopping From the assembler instruction NOP (no operation). Similar to nap but doesn’t imply sleep, just zoning out.
Object Oriented Pasta Used to describe spaghetti code wrapped in classes to make it look like an object.
Perl-Grade Obfuscation The highest level of code obfuscation possible. Better than passing code through a 1-way hash function.
Refuctoring The process of taking a well-designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anyone except yourself.
Rubberducking The process of talking your own way through a problem, as if talking to a rubber duck.
Scar Tissue Any code that is commented out but still included in the current and/or checked-in version.
Smurf Naming Convention When almost every class has the same prefix. IE, when a user clicks on the button, a SmurfAccountView passes a SmurfAccountDTO to the SmurfAccountController. The SmurfID is used to fetch a SmurfOrderHistory which is passed to the SmurfHistoryMatch…
Stringly Typed One of the antitheses of strongly typed. It describes an implementation that uses strings where more strongly-type options are available.
Try, Catch, Forget An empty catch block, no tracing, not even a comment. No attempt to resolve the error and of course the catch block is not at all specific on the exception type.