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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Do you also complain when people say they have a “bug” in their code or that they have a “server farm”? Are they literally watering the server floor and waiting for computers to grow?

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Not at all. It's in this case, using the term serverless is akin to calling cloud based software (Google Docs, TurboTax, etc) softwareless. It's closer to calling a stop sign a "go sign" than descriptors from your example. Calling managed servers "serverless" is distinctively misleading.

How is it any more misleading than “bugs”, “containers”, “the cloud”,”server farms”, etc.

Wouldn’t you be the first to criticize someone who didn’t take the time to understand other computer concepts that had been around for years and then attempted to speak intelligently about them?

The term serverless is not a metaphor like your examples, it's a contradiction. Big difference. I feel like understanding the "computer concepts" makes the term seem even more absurd.

It’s an abstraction - just like every other computer concept.

An abstraction where "positive" and "negative" mean the same just for safety so they can't be confused with each other.

You’ve never worked with C code that had to run on both big endian and little endian systems that had to share a common byte protocol. Where two bytes in the same order can mean something completely different.

There are a lot of things “confusing” about computer science when you don’t take the time to learn it.

On the contrary, I've worked with 8 and {32,64}bit x {LE,BE} chips many times and wrote quite a lot of network code in C. But you're mixing syntax with semantics.

Which byte is the high order byte is just as much semantics defined by the chip vendor that would be confusing to the uninitiated as “Serverless” would be to an old school net ops person who doesn’t know anything about cloud computing.

It's misleading because "serverless" intuitively means peer to peer, where everything runs on clients and there are truly no servers. So unlike "bug" it has an intuitive meaning that is the opposite of what the buzzword now means.

Serverless has never been used in the context of peer to peer. And “bug” isn’t anymore “intuitive” to the uninitiated.

There is a huge difference between a metaphor (resemblance) and contradiction (stating it is and isn't something at the same time).

What’s the “resemblance” of “running in the cloud” to “running on servers owned by someone else”?

It isn't a great name, but: it doesn't bare a contradiction in itself (contrary to "serverless"), there was already a tradition of drawing unspecified networks or internet as a cloud in diagrams. So "running in the cloud" as running "somewhere in the network we used to draw as a cloud" has an explanation. Also note, I didn't state that there are only two types of names. I commented on what "bug" and "serverless" is.

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