4 ms·

Oh come on. Is it still not accepted that "serverless" is the colloquial name for AWS Lambda and comparable services? Stop trying to make "FaaS" happen. It's

by luhn 10y ago

Oh come on. Is it still not accepted that "serverless" is the colloquial name for AWS Lambda and comparable services? Stop trying to make "FaaS" happen. It's not going to happen.

CaptSpify 10y ago
Just because you abstract something away doesn't mean it no longer exists. I don't manually manage cache on my laptop's HD, but that doesn't mean it's "cacheless".
- luhn 10y ago
  I'm not saying "serverless" is a good term, I'm saying that it's the term. It's won. You can argue all you want that it's a terribly misleading/incorrect term, but people aren't going to stop using it. So let's move on.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    > It's won. That’s the linguistic descriptivist position. We can also require all papers and journals and conferences to use "Function as a Service" everywhere, and force all professors to teach "Function as a Service", and require all official publications to use "Function as a Service", by defining an authoritative dictionary, which gets its authority by law. Then wait a few months, and the term "serverless" will be gone. Some countries handle their entire language that way – and have an official institution tasked with updating the language every few years, and the updates become mandatory for business communication, press releases, and schools. Germany and France are some examples. IMO, having grown up right after one of the largest such changes in recent German history, it’s a better system than letting the mob decide how to call things, or how to write words, because that leads to pure chaos.
    - benballjr 10y ago
      It really has more to do with what the vendors creating the "serverless" tools perpetuating at the industry level. You can blame the technical marketing teams and tech media that also pick up the terminology (whoops, our bad).
    - pjc50 10y ago
      Is this a parody? Prescriptivism in law is completely unthinkable to UK/US native English speakers.
      - kuschku 10y ago
        Well, in France, or Germany (where I’m from), I grew up right after such a change had happened. I’m not sure why English speakers resist it so much, it simplifies the situation so much, and isn’t an issue anyway.
        pjc50 10y ago
        It's a philosophical red line, really. It's simply not something that belongs to the state, or even to the country. It would be like trying to legislate that the sky was green. Similarly the metric system - which has actual advantages that mere linguistic change does not, and legal support - has been accepted only very grudgingly. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Martyrs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Martyrs ) (Doesn't linguistic reform occasionally cause discontinuities in literature? What happens if you want to use a metaphor or turn of phrase that's been forcibly obsoleted? Like, I might occasionally refer to something as being "tuppence-ha'penny", despite that coin being abolished over thirty years ago.
        kuschku 10y ago
        > What happens if you want to use a metaphor or turn of phrase that's been forcibly obsoleted? The same that happens when you try to read any old literature. Like the Illias, which talks about "wine-colored sea" (it was dark blue – the brightness was meant, not hue), or shakespear, etc. > It's simply not something that belongs to the state, or even to the country. That likely differs here because the German language was unified in the first place by an academic, and not through consensus.
    - res0nat0r 10y ago
      Seems like we are getting in the weeds over silly semantics. When you hear "serverless", just think of it as a service where you don't have to worry about running or maintaining your own OS on a server weather that is virtual or bare metal. That's it, it's as simple as that.
    - detaro 10y ago
      Having a unified way of how to spell things is quite different then prescribing what to call specific things. Which luckily outside of very limited areas (legal terms, protected names and trademarks) doesn't exist in your example countries either.
      - kuschku 10y ago
        Yes, it does. We’ve renamed Camouflieren to Tarnen, and many other words like that. There’s hundreds of cases of words being entire replaced. A list of replacements of the past centuries, for example: Distanz → Abstand, Liberey → Bücherei, Moment → Augenblick, Passion → Leidenschaft, Projekt → Entwurf, Addresse → Anschrift, Korrespondenz → Briefwechsel, Komödie → Lustspiel, Dialekt → Mundart, Orthographie → Rechtschreibung, Journal → Tagebuch, Autor → Verfasser, Fundament → Grundlage, Antike → Altertum, Parterre → Erdgeschoss, Universität → Hochschule, Terrorismus → Schreckensherrschaft, Singular → Einzahl, Plural → Mehrzahl, poste restante → postlagernd, Coupé → Abteil, Perron → Bahnsteig, Billet → Fahrkarte, Retourbillet → Rückfahrkarte, download → herunterladen. And even today there are large companies even funding groups working on replacing parts of the language, be it to replace foreign words, or to simplify words: https://www.rossmann.de/unternehmen/soziale-verantwortung/soziale-projekte/verein-deutsche-sprache.html https://www.rossmann.de/unternehmen/soziale-verantwortung/so... Obviously, the far-right takes it to an extreme level, even replacing Internet with Weltnetz, but even in the left-wing there’s no opposition to replacing words, or simplifying the language. And even those opposing those changes (see criticism section here https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschreibung_von_1996 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschr... ) don’t oppose these concepts in general, just would rather like to see different changes.
        detaro 10y ago
        And most of these examples are in the common dictionaries, used in major newspapers, will be accepted in your high-school German tests (as long as you use them appropriately and spell them correctly) and are used or at least easily understood by all native speakers. The others fell out of use over time. Recommendations by various authorities on what constitutes "good" use of language change, and in Germany there might be more reliance on the big dictionaries (but I honestly can't accurately gauge how this compares to various parts of society in English-speaking countries), but actual language use does not care all that much. The reforms and the dictionary are very relevant for spelling and grammar, but have not much influence on actual selection of words, even less in specialist subjects. People try to change language use with all kinds of motivations all the time, but they can't do much more than suggest, individuals and organizations decide what they agree to and what they don't. And this exists in other languages just as much (trying to avoid offensive terms, trying to sound modern, trying to remove foreign influences).
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    I'm not convinced it's won. Especially since there's still tons of blog posts arguing over the definition
benballjr 10y ago
Serverless is definitely the accepted term. FaaS and BaaS (backend as a service) are both serverless implementations--is my understanding.
gohrt 10y ago
Sigh, Why isn't just "Cloud"? They thought "cloud" sounded old and lame, so they made up an even dumber name to sound futuristic?

by luhn 10y ago

Oh come on. Is it still not accepted that "serverless" is the colloquial name for AWS Lambda and comparable services? Stop trying to make "FaaS" happen. It's not going to happen.

CaptSpify 10y ago

Just because you abstract something away doesn't mean it no longer exists. I don't manually manage cache on my laptop's HD, but that doesn't mean it's "cacheless".

luhn 10y ago
I'm not saying "serverless" is a good term, I'm saying that it's the term. It's won. You can argue all you want that it's a terribly misleading/incorrect term, but people aren't going to stop using it. So let's move on.
- kuschku 10y ago
  > It's won. That’s the linguistic descriptivist position. We can also require all papers and journals and conferences to use "Function as a Service" everywhere, and force all professors to teach "Function as a Service", and require all official publications to use "Function as a Service", by defining an authoritative dictionary, which gets its authority by law. Then wait a few months, and the term "serverless" will be gone. Some countries handle their entire language that way – and have an official institution tasked with updating the language every few years, and the updates become mandatory for business communication, press releases, and schools. Germany and France are some examples. IMO, having grown up right after one of the largest such changes in recent German history, it’s a better system than letting the mob decide how to call things, or how to write words, because that leads to pure chaos.
  - benballjr 10y ago
    It really has more to do with what the vendors creating the "serverless" tools perpetuating at the industry level. You can blame the technical marketing teams and tech media that also pick up the terminology (whoops, our bad).
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Is this a parody? Prescriptivism in law is completely unthinkable to UK/US native English speakers.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Well, in France, or Germany (where I’m from), I grew up right after such a change had happened. I’m not sure why English speakers resist it so much, it simplifies the situation so much, and isn’t an issue anyway.
      - pjc50 10y ago
        It's a philosophical red line, really. It's simply not something that belongs to the state, or even to the country. It would be like trying to legislate that the sky was green. Similarly the metric system - which has actual advantages that mere linguistic change does not, and legal support - has been accepted only very grudgingly. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Martyrs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Martyrs ) (Doesn't linguistic reform occasionally cause discontinuities in literature? What happens if you want to use a metaphor or turn of phrase that's been forcibly obsoleted? Like, I might occasionally refer to something as being "tuppence-ha'penny", despite that coin being abolished over thirty years ago.
        kuschku 10y ago
        > What happens if you want to use a metaphor or turn of phrase that's been forcibly obsoleted? The same that happens when you try to read any old literature. Like the Illias, which talks about "wine-colored sea" (it was dark blue – the brightness was meant, not hue), or shakespear, etc. > It's simply not something that belongs to the state, or even to the country. That likely differs here because the German language was unified in the first place by an academic, and not through consensus.
  - res0nat0r 10y ago
    Seems like we are getting in the weeds over silly semantics. When you hear "serverless", just think of it as a service where you don't have to worry about running or maintaining your own OS on a server weather that is virtual or bare metal. That's it, it's as simple as that.
  - detaro 10y ago
    Having a unified way of how to spell things is quite different then prescribing what to call specific things. Which luckily outside of very limited areas (legal terms, protected names and trademarks) doesn't exist in your example countries either.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Yes, it does. We’ve renamed Camouflieren to Tarnen, and many other words like that. There’s hundreds of cases of words being entire replaced. A list of replacements of the past centuries, for example: Distanz → Abstand, Liberey → Bücherei, Moment → Augenblick, Passion → Leidenschaft, Projekt → Entwurf, Addresse → Anschrift, Korrespondenz → Briefwechsel, Komödie → Lustspiel, Dialekt → Mundart, Orthographie → Rechtschreibung, Journal → Tagebuch, Autor → Verfasser, Fundament → Grundlage, Antike → Altertum, Parterre → Erdgeschoss, Universität → Hochschule, Terrorismus → Schreckensherrschaft, Singular → Einzahl, Plural → Mehrzahl, poste restante → postlagernd, Coupé → Abteil, Perron → Bahnsteig, Billet → Fahrkarte, Retourbillet → Rückfahrkarte, download → herunterladen. And even today there are large companies even funding groups working on replacing parts of the language, be it to replace foreign words, or to simplify words: https://www.rossmann.de/unternehmen/soziale-verantwortung/soziale-projekte/verein-deutsche-sprache.html https://www.rossmann.de/unternehmen/soziale-verantwortung/so... Obviously, the far-right takes it to an extreme level, even replacing Internet with Weltnetz, but even in the left-wing there’s no opposition to replacing words, or simplifying the language. And even those opposing those changes (see criticism section here https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschreibung_von_1996 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschr... ) don’t oppose these concepts in general, just would rather like to see different changes.
      - detaro 10y ago
        And most of these examples are in the common dictionaries, used in major newspapers, will be accepted in your high-school German tests (as long as you use them appropriately and spell them correctly) and are used or at least easily understood by all native speakers. The others fell out of use over time. Recommendations by various authorities on what constitutes "good" use of language change, and in Germany there might be more reliance on the big dictionaries (but I honestly can't accurately gauge how this compares to various parts of society in English-speaking countries), but actual language use does not care all that much. The reforms and the dictionary are very relevant for spelling and grammar, but have not much influence on actual selection of words, even less in specialist subjects. People try to change language use with all kinds of motivations all the time, but they can't do much more than suggest, individuals and organizations decide what they agree to and what they don't. And this exists in other languages just as much (trying to avoid offensive terms, trying to sound modern, trying to remove foreign influences).
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I'm not convinced it's won. Especially since there's still tons of blog posts arguing over the definition

benballjr 10y ago

Serverless is definitely the accepted term. FaaS and BaaS (backend as a service) are both serverless implementations--is my understanding.

gohrt 10y ago

Sigh, Why isn't just "Cloud"? They thought "cloud" sounded old and lame, so they made up an even dumber name to sound futuristic?