Look, I ain't no fancy U of T CS grajuit -- just a Sudbury-area high school dropout of approximately Reg's vintage -- and I fell into programming quite by accid

Look, I ain't no fancy U of T CS grajuit -- just a Sudbury-area high school dropout of approximately Reg's vintage -- and I fell into programming quite by accident, but I see the value in having a common language that is very specific to what we do. Call it a jargon if you want; it is the correct term. That doesn't make it invalid as a tool for communication. Mechanics would expect that others of the guild would know the difference between a Phillips screwdriver and a Reed & Prince; they wouldn't expect it of the average tinkerer (and unless you know the difference, you will strip screws and wind up cursing a lot). Every trade, every profession has its "in" vocabulary -- why on earth should programming (or, to elevate the craft beyond its current state of the art, "Software Engineering") be any different? Whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, we do some pretty serious stuff (once we progress beyond "Hello, world" or Aunt Nell's cat fancier web site). Why shouldn't we take ourselves seriously? I mean, cripes, I worried about big O, edge cases, maintainability and profiling when I started developing Notes applications after transitioning from years as a shoe shiner and apprentice cobbler. OO concepts were not far behind, and anyone who has done anything non-trrivial in JavaScript should have knocked up against functional programming principles at some point. Each of those has its own associated terminology. As an autodidact, I understand that there are some things I just plain ought to know if I want to participate in this little part of the world. I see no particular reason why I should be responsible not only for re-inventing the wheel, but for reconceptualising roundness on a daily basis. If as high school dropout I can take the time to learn the language and the concepts it represents, why shouldn't I be able to expect the same from people who entered the guild in a more conventional manner? It's nothing more than Mike the plumber would expect from his peers.