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Comment by sseagull | Hacker News Reader

> They call it "codes"

They/We have probably been calling it that since before you were alive. I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes from the 60s or 70s.

Every group of people has their own terminology for stuff. There is no right or wrong.

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Yeah. Considering how much time we spend developing and using the damn things, we’ll call them the way we like, thank you very much. We don’t really need condescending software types to just come and explain to us how we’re saying it wrong. That is particularly rich, considering the tendency of CS people to cargo cult and borrow physical terms without understanding them.

Yes, please stop naming your software projects after elementary particles :).

Always annoying to hear machine learning people speak of "tensors"...

I'm still waiting for std::pseudovector<T>

It aggravates me too, however, considering that the definition of a tensor according to mathematicians is an element of the tensor product of two vector spaces (or whatever other objects you can tensor together), and according to physicists would be an object which transforms like a tensor, I’m somewhat sympathetic. Neither definition sheds any light on what a tensor is to anyone who doesn’t already understand what a tensor is, and I’m convinced that the moment one understands what tensors are they lose the ability to explain what tensors are.

I have an academic mathematics background and I'm perfectly OK with this.

Sure, there's no absolute right or wrong on terminology, but it is a sign that they're cut off from the software engineering world, which leads to a whole host of dumb practices, described elsewhere in the comments here.

As someone with a mathematics background, whenever I encounter someone in another community using mathematics (like economics or accounting or finance or whatever) using mathematical terminology that seems silly to me, it's a bad sign.

I have never heard or read anyone, beside physicists, say codes for software code. It doesn't even make sense. Where have you seen that used?

I have never heard or read anyone, beside physicists, say codes for software code. It doesn't even make sense.

Why not? "A code" is a software package which solves some kind of problem computationally. Plural, codes. I'm sure it's been in use almost as long as the programmable computers. Here's[1] a link to an article from 1968 which uses the term in the singular ("The MENE Neutron Transport Code".)

[1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/4819611-mene-neutron-transport-c...

There are plenty of words in English that have the same singular and plural form.

That article appears to be written by a non-native English speaker. I don't think I've ever heard anyone refer to a software package as "a code."

I don't think I've ever heard anyone refer to a software package as "a code."

Then you probably haven't been around physicists, or read enough physics-related material. A non-scholarly reference which can't be easily checked online is George Dyson's "Project Orion," where Freeman Dyson (author's father) is quoted as mentioning this or that "code" as significant for the design of various Orion parts. (That should be a native enough English speaker.) The time-frame is late 1950s to early 1960s.

Actually I have been around physicists. In my experience they use “codes” for any amount of code. If A wrote some software, B might say “I’d like to use your codes.”

That reference you give doesn’t appear to be available online but I’ll take your word for it.

It’s used fairly often in the US national lab community (Not just among physicists).

I think the point is that the physicists were among the very early adopters of computing systems. I’m not sure about the history of the term “code” used this way, but it might literally predate compiled software since Ulam and von Neumann invented the Monte Carlo method in 1948 during the Manhattan Project.

Personally I think it just sounds outdated now, but it’s pretty common to hear people call their software “a hydrodynamics code” or “a molecular dynamics code”

Now I do wonder about the history of the term.

The tendency is to call computational science software “codes”, but I’ve never heard a scientist call, ie a web browser, a code.

There’s a different connotation. Like how theres a different connotation between a program, an application, and and app. The are largely synonymous, but have slightly different uses.

I've seen it a lot outside of physics.

Obviously, what word they use for it is arbitrary but it's indicative of an actual problem - they're all totally cut off from the software engineering / CS community. Lots of them think programming is like learning to juggle or ride a bike or something, a skill that anyone just learns and then they're done. Then, obviously, they make major mistakes that invalidate their conclusions and nobody notices or cares because it's all student code, all the time.

It's pretty widely used in "traditional" engineering, at least in mechanical/civil/nuclear/aerospace. My impression is that it's probably a holdover from the good old days FORTRAN-IV.

See for example Code_Aster (as in, "a code"), which is one of the largest projects for open source FEA (and it mostly rooted in academia).

All mechanical engineers. All of them. Even that guy, who corrects himself when you're in the room - as soon as you're gone, they're back to the codes.

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