New programming jargon you coined | Hacker News Reader

New programming jargon you coined

stackoverflow.com

56 pointsiamanet15 comments

I have one, at work and amongst friends, named after me :(

"Flakey Tom" - which basically is when someone (usually me) writes some code, tests/debugs it, runs compiler test, ensure it works etc.... and then adds "one extra quick line of code" (it will be fine guys!) before checking it into the main branch.

And subsequently everything breaks for about 3 hours.

Ouch. I've been known to do that... and my name is Tom :(

I'm lucky enough to currently not work with collegues that could coin names for my failures, I'd hate to imagine what a 'jam' looks like. It might be 'idiot move to add one item to a firewall access list that locks out the idiot and the rest of the internet, requiring a live body to transport himself to the hosting facility'. Of course this never happened. I wish.

Shit happens, don't worry about it.

And I think that there are a lot of 'Flakey Toms' on HN, even when they're named George or Sally :)

My favorite: "Barack Obama - An account in Redmine that we assign our most aspirational tickets to, i.e. the stuff we'd really like to do with a project but will probably never get approval for."

My favorites:

Doctype Decoration: When web designers add a doctype declaration but don't bother to write valid markup.

Object Oriented Pasta: Used to describe spaghetti code wrapped in classes to make it look like an object.

Hooker Code: Code that is problematic and causes application instability (application "goes down" often).

These are really funny. Especially the Object Oriented Pasta.

I've seen some of that and had to clean it up, it made me wish for a shotgun and some ammo at times.

My favourite: Megamoth.

Stands for MEGA MOnolithic meTHod. Often contained inside a God Object, and usually stretches over two screens in height.

Megamoths of greater size than 2k LOC have been sighted. Beware of the MEGAMOTH!

What's worst, these usually contain mission-critical code. I have had to tackle a 6k line one, in PL/SQL.

You open up a package, the line count reads 6k. You shudder. Then, you notice that the structure tree has only one entry. One procedure. Feeling of absolute defeat sets in.

Fortunately, it was only about 4k of actual LoC, because the previous developers had created a ghetto version control using comments.

Still, it took me the better part of the day to find what I was looking for in it.

I witnessed a 64KB java method once (compiled). Since 64KB is the limit for a method in a classfile, the programmer was always running into trouble with the compiler. Not very smart.

Having a shared vocabulary is critical for communicating and new terms are always being invented as technology progresses. Reading this actually helped clarify my thought process in some areas. A million internets to OP.

When coding in LabView I like to call the wires and blocks spaghetti and plates because it's always spaghetti code and it looks like two waiter collided on a busy day.

(i.e. http://www.dieterb.de/ccdlockin/diagram.png, not mine)

I'm coining "speed chess programming".

Getting a bunch of programmings together to hack out a quick project with limited time to think about your next move.

My favorite:

Bloombug: A bug that accidentally generates money

I have one just now, it inspired this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1332560

I noticed a certain bug actually caused me a bit of extra income so I left it in place. It still is, it still makes money, and has been going for about 5 months now.

Uh-Oh Programming

I coined this as a play on "OO Programming" to refer to code that is Seriously OO With Lots of Design Patterns, many layers and too many abstractions such that what could have been a fairly simple and smaller program has become a huge mass of files, classes, interfaces, methods, each of which does very little, and is almost impossible to tell exactly what it does without stepping through it in the debugger. Whenever I've seen Uh-Oh code, it is almost always Java (because the OO/DP/injection craze was not in full bloom back when I worked with C++ a lot), almost always wired up at the very top with Spring XML, and maintained by a large number of salaried programmers in an enterprise development environment (where IT is a cost center, not the actual product they sell.) -- can you say, job security?

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