Ah yes, you reminded me. There was another piece of jargon I was trying to come up with that really stinks earlier, but I couldn't remember it. And that's what

Ah yes, you reminded me. There was another piece of jargon I was trying to come up with that really stinks earlier, but I couldn't remember it. And that's what it was: dynamic programming. Terrible name: "Where did the name, dynamic programming, come from? The 1950s were not good years for mathematical research. We had a very interesting gentleman in Washington named Wilson. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had a pathological fear and hatred of the word research. I’m not using the term lightly; I’m using it precisely. His face would suffuse, he would turn red, and he would get violent if people used the term research in his presence. You can imagine how he felt, then, about the term mathematical. The RAND Corporation was employed by the Air Force, and the Air Force had Wilson as its boss, essentially. Hence, I felt I had to do something to shield Wilson and the Air Force from the fact that I was really doing mathematics inside the RAND Corporation. What title, what name, could I choose? In the first place I was interested in planning, in decision making, in thinking. But planning, is not a good word for various reasons. I decided therefore to use the word “programming”. I wanted to get across the idea that this was dynamic, this was multistage, this was time-varying. I thought, let's kill two birds with one stone. Let's take a word that has an absolutely precise meaning, namely dynamic, in the classical physical sense. It also has a very interesting property as an adjective, and that is it's impossible to use the word dynamic in a pejorative sense. Try thinking of some combination that will possibly give it a pejorative meaning. It's impossible. Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. It was something not even a Congressman could object to." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#History A Congressman may not be able to object, but I do! It's a particular flavor of recursion, and perhaps a flavor of the term "recursion" would be called for, but "dynamic programming" is essentially meaningless. Any addition meaning that phrase may have in your head is almost certainly unrelated to what the term refers to, since we've used "static" and "dynamic" in all sorts of ways since the 1950s.