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Comment by neurobro | Hacker News Reader

It is a word because people keep using it. That's where words come from. Apart from the number of characters, it is no better or worse than other words/phrases having the same meaning. Sometimes the precise meaning is clear from the background context. Sometimes additional details need to be supplied outside of the title or bullet point where it is used.

What does "it" mean above? Devoid of context, it could be just about anything.

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I understand the concept of "it's a word because people use it" - but what does it actually mean? No one can give a consistent defininition because it's nebulous jargon with no clear or specific meaning. Without fail, every single usage is obfuscating or otherwise hiding the intended meaning.

Check out this Unity blog post I just came across: "Achieve beautiful, scalable, and performant graphics with the Universal Render Pipeline"

What exactly are "performant graphics"? Does that mean high frame-rate? High-poly? Extremely vibrant colors? HDR? Can run on a 486 with software rendering?

It doesn't tell me anything, and is essentially "vocabulary clickbait" - it "sounds good", without really communicating anything. This is why I despise this word.

In context, I would expect "performance" to refer to how quickly a scene can be rendered, and another buzzword, "scalable", to refer to the size and complexity of scenes that can be drawn. "Beautiful" probably means "lots of detail and snazzy effects."

Actually, the article says "scalable across platforms", which is confusing to me. Maybe they mean scalable to different screen sizes?

It seems pretty obvious to me in context what the word means. You could play that game with literally every word in the sentence.

What does "achieve" mean? It's that way out of the box? If I invest in a special team of Unity developers it's possible? They'll give it to me if I work hard enough?

What does "beautiful" mean? High poly? Vibrant color? Critics or fans say it looks good? There's an object beauty score that it has high marks in?

ad nauseam

> it is no better or worse than other words/phrases having the same meaning

It is demonstrably worse than phrases like "low latency" which clarify the desired property of the system being discussed.

I'm not a huge fan of "high performance" but at least I kind of know what "high performance computing" means (usually systems that are capable of processing massive data sets with high throughput.)

In contrast, "performant" as it is commonly (mis)used doesn't seem have a precise meaning other than "good according to some unspecified metric."

What do you mean by "low latency"? Low latency before the user sees anything? Low latency before the user can interact with the app? Low latency navigating to the next page? It's hard to answer every conceivable question in a headline.

Everything is vague to some degree. The hand-wringing over "performant" is just a meme.

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