Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I don't use it either, and I agree with the poster on that stackexchange link about it sounding like manager/marketing-speak, but when I see it, it makes me pause for a second to think about what really means (perhaps that's the point) --- I had this exchange with a coworker not long ago:

CW: ...and this way it'll be more performant too.

Me: Performant? As in faster?

CW: Yes.

Me (to self): Then why didn't you just say it'll be faster?

IMHO it obfuscates meaning and should be avoided; the surrounding discussion/vagueness about what it means (I don't think it means efficient, but only faster --- as in, a high-performance car) shows that too.

View on HN

Performant to me implies performing better against the relevant metrics. So faster, maybe, but perhaps smaller and more energy efficient too. If the context of the metrics is already understood then it seems quite a cromulent word.

What's cromulent mean? I looked it up at dictionary.com and couldn't find anything. Or are you making up more words to point out the irony? :)

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/cromulent

"Acceptable or adequate"

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/cromulent

It's from the Simpsons and that is pretty much exactly the context that it first appeared in! Here's an excerpt from the "Made-up words" article on the simpsons.wikia.com:

When schoolteacher Edna Krabappel hears the Springfield town motto "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man," she comments she'd never heard of the word embiggens before moving to Springfield. Miss Hoover replies, "I don't know why; it's a perfectly cromulent word".

Others have filled in the detail of origin and meaning. Yes, my intent was to use another neologism to add an ironic tone. Language is always changing.

I wonder if you can use "cromulent" to guess the age of a person. Older people would not have watched the Simpsons in the early 90s. Younger people very likely missed this obscure episode. I would guess an age of the user to be 30-35.

The episode was first aired in Feb ‘96, at which point I was 20, and in college. At this point the show was still quite popular with my friend group. I am currently 42. You might need to increase your upper bound on the age range.

I may be an outlier but as a seventeen year old, I'd already heard of 'cromulent' (from the Simpsons, but through Reddit).

My editor, in his mid 60s, uses cromulent quite regularly.

You're not far out, but I must have missed that episode originally and only watched it in the last few years. I possibly also learnt it from Reddit first.

I had just explained the etomology of cromulent to my wife a few days ago - awesome to have an example of its usage in the wild. My hat is off to you, sir.

To be fair, "faster" in the context of software development can also frequently refer to the time it takes to implement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com