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New Programming Jargon
- sidcool 14y agoJust when I think Jeff has written one of his best posts ever, he comes up with something even more interesting. Well done Jeff.
- Ralith 14y agoHe hardly came up with the content of this post--just copied it from a deleted SO question.
- codinghorror 14y agoThere are two parts. The meta part, which is "why is this deleted? should it have been deleted? can you reasonably expect anyone to learn from this question? what happens when a site is overrun with questions like this one?" And then the content, which is a mirror of the deleted question. Pick whichever part interests you.
- Ralith 14y agoI don't mean to imply that you didn't author anything of value in the post. The meta was certainly of interest. I'd just hesitate to call a few paragraphs of discussion of the reasons behind SO's moderation your "best post ever." Come to think of it, I wouldn't call an array of proposed/observed novel jargon that either, regardless of its source.
- codinghorror 14y agoBelieve me, I have serious issues with the "top N funny things" sorts of content that rules the web, and that is reflected in the design of Stack Exchange. At the same time, I am torn, because you can learn a little bit from content like this. And the audience loves it. If we didn't have any systems in place to tamp down on poll/survey/opinion questions, Stack Overflow would be virtually nothing but those kinds of question. They are INSANELY popular.
- derefr 14y agoHow about an extra core site that isn't required to follow the "every question only exists to educate those who end up finding it through Google" pattern of the rest of the StackExchange network, but simply serves as a StackExchange-powered community forum? Of course, It would only really make sense if whole topics could be pushed there with all their comments and votes intact; otherwise it would just be a ghetto to shove overly-gregarious users into.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sidcool 14y agoYou are right, but conjuring up an article like this is no easy a task.
- RegEx 14y ago"Yoda Conditions" takes the cake. It's pretty interesting how a commutative operation such as `==` still has certain conventions. Then again, `==` isn't guaranteed to be commutative in Ruby, since it can be overridden (which I'm not a big fan of).
- BadassFractal 14y agoCan't stand Yoda conditions, although I'm sure someone somewhere has an explanation why they're so good for me.
- dllthomas 14y agoif(x = 3) if(3 = x) If you make a habit of making the left side of == immutable, the compiler will let you know when you type = instead. Of course, gcc throws a warning unless you type if((x = 3)) if you genuinely want to do the assignment inside the if, which works just as well but requires tool support.
- DHowett 14y agoWhat tool support does it require? I certainly hope there are no tools generating assignments in conditional expressions, and the only other tools that need to support it clearly understand parentheses.
- dllthomas 14y agoThe warning itself is dependent on your compiler squawking when it sees "if(x = 5)". The C spec doesn't require this. On the other hand, "if(5 = x)" will be thrown out by any C compiler.
- jimrandomh 14y agoThey were invented to defend against a (mis)feature of C and some other programming languages, where you can use '=' in an expression when you meant to use '==', getting an assignment instead of a comparison. If there's a constant on the left, then this would be an error. However, most compilers now generate warnings in all of the cases where Yoda conditions would've helped, but conventions tend to outlast their purpose.
- freditup 14y agoHee hee, I'm a fan of #8: 8. Heisenbug Source: Unknown A computer bug that disappears or alters its characteristics when an attempt is made to study it. On the other note - I personally think most online communities tend to get more lenient overtime. I'd be interested in any further reading on that matter.
- kleevr 14y agoRan into one of these about a month ago. I was working with some sketch PHP that was resulting in a seg fault, when I attached xdebug and stepped through the code, it ran fine.
- thaumaturgy 14y ago"Heisenbug" as a term has been around for a while. It's one of my favorites, too -- despite referring to possibly my least favorite part of programming. Timing-related errors make the worst heisenbugs. I had one once where pausing through the code caused the code to work, so I cobbled together a quick debug logging facility for it, and that still caused the code to work just fine. Anything that altered the code by more than a few milliseconds of execution time caused it to work OK. I stared at it for a while and then rewrote the entire block in disgust.
- freditup 14y agoI hadn't heard it before, but it's a great term! I know one multiplayer Flash service has a problem where their server clocks had drifted apart, and it caused all sorts of crazy issues. Took them a couple of weeks to figure it out and fix the problem. Not quite a Heisenbug maybe, but close. (http://playerio.com/forum/multiplayer/room-disappears-from-list-while-still-active-t33960 http://playerio.com/forum/multiplayer/room-disappears-from-l...) I've had bugs before that have seemed to come and go for absolutely no reason - I think they involved corrupted incremental compilations, but who knows.
- 4ad 14y agoCute name, but inaccurate. The property of things changing when you observe them is not the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, it's the observer effect. These often confused ideas are unrelated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)#Quantum_mechanics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)#Quant... Rob Pike mentioned this: http://commandcenter.blogspot.ro/2010/08/know-your-science.html http://commandcenter.blogspot.ro/2010/08/know-your-science.h...
- dionidium 14y agoThese bits are too silly for the internet, so we're going to move them over here to this other part of the internet. Sigh. This deletionism accomplishes nothing.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- civilian 14y agoIt pretty much wrote a blogpost
- codinghorror 14y agoThere's a reason the frat house isn't in the middle of the classroom on most college campuses. Because it'd interfere with learning. Frat row is, y'know, over there. Slightly off campus.
- tbeseda 14y agoNot sure your analogy holds up as "frat row" is often right on the main green of many notable campuses.
- codinghorror 14y agoYes, but is it in the middle of the classroom? Anyway, frat row was pretty far off main campus (sorry, "the lawn") where I went to college, at UVa.
- LeafStorm 14y agoIf Stack Overflow is the classroom, frat row would be more like My Little Pony discussions. Questions like "What programming terms have you coined?" would be more for the breakroom or the cafeteria...you don't want them to get mixed in with the proper instructional material, but at the same time you don't put them all the way across a major thoroughfare.
- majormajor 14y ago
- malkia 14y agoPokemon exceptions - our level editor embraces them :) The result is, if something goes wrong, all you get is grayness, what follows is run Visual Studio, reproduce the bug, make sure that now catches exceptions before you, and hope it's not a heisenbug...
- vhf 14y agoLooks like English language is adapting to problems it wasn't made for. :)
- civilian 14y agoI really liked: headlessCamels and ProudCamels for verbally differentiating between the two different types of camelCase (or CamelCase) (which was in the extended scrape of the original question: http://www.stackprinter.com/export?question=2349378&service=stackoverflow http://www.stackprinter.com/export?question=2349378&serv... )
- eridius 14y agoI prefer CamelCase vs dromedaryCase.
- montecarl 14y agoI like camelCase and StudlyCaps.
- jim_kaiser 14y agoI prefer the vanilla "PascalCase" and "CamelCase". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CamelCase http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CamelCase
- dos1 14y agoI'm not sure why SO feels the need to delete posts like this. I get that the "question" isn't keeping with their stated objectives, but I find the answers to be enlightening in some respects. I've learned about many new technologies and frameworks from the "What is the best X to use for Y" questions that get posted frequently. I don't see those as detrimental to the community like the SO mods apparently do.
- codinghorror 14y agosee http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-su... It's possible, provided you're careful about how you do it and thoughtful in your approach. Basically, if a question can have (and will eventually accrete) infinite answers, that's a problem for a Q&A system, unless it is Q&A in name only.
- cloverich 14y agoPedantry is inevitable when programmers are in charge ^^ Seriously though, there's not a good argument for deleting it. There are plenty of terrible, off-topic, garbage questions on there to be closed. Why focus the few that, while probably off-format, result in entertaining (and sometimes) enlightening results? Sure, if the site was flooded with posts like that, then maybe. Maybe. But its not. Its just one group deciding to be pedantic. Nothing more.
- codinghorror 14y agoTwo reasons. 1) broken windows and 2) opportunity cost. It's like Kudzu: the more you allow, the more there will be, because it grows like a weed and it is insanely popular.
- joshuahedlund 14y agoClearly there is high demand for these kinds of questions. I've noticed a lot of the more general/meta but serious programming questions are flourishing on the Programmers SE site[1]. Is there one for fun programming questions yet? I'm kinda surprised there's not when clearly the community wants to engage in one. [1]http://programmers.stackexchange.com/?tab=month http://programmers.stackexchange.com/?tab=month
- sophacles 14y agoJust the other day, I was struggling to concisely explain the problem with a system I've been tasked with rewriting. (The question was why are we not reusing X, Y and Z?). If only I'd read about baklava code that day.
- mgkimsal 14y agoNADS - Non-Authoritative Data Source - a condition where there are multiple sources for the same piece of data, usually manifesting itself via the same data existing in 2 Access files and 3 different Excel files continually emailed around between people over years.
- marquis 14y agoSince the men get Mad Girlfriend and Hooker Code, I'd like to add 'Old Boys Club': libraries that you will never for the life of you get to work on modern operating systems and force you to stay on Python 2.4.
- etfb 14y agoAn author who has the bad taste and poor judgement to publicise concepts like the "Mad Girlfriend Bug" doesn't have the right to legislate good taste and good judgement anywhere, even on a website he runs. It's automatic disqualification, no appeal.
- lmm 14y agoThen enjoy living in a stack overflow-less world, since that's what we'd have if we followed your rules.
- feralmoan 14y agocopypastas? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1332817 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1332817 tisk tisk.
- freditup 14y agoI think both articles are just pretty much copied from the now hidden Stack Overflow question.
- codyromano 14y agoVery funny. Pokémon exception handling is my favorite.
- SiVal 14y agoI can't help noticing how often I've -- had a programming question -- googled it -- found the very first (most relevant) link to be to StackOverflow -- jumped to it -- found that some other programmer had also asked the same question -- found that other SO members had given the question and its answers hundreds of bonus points (useful!) -- and found that the SO mod-nazis had shut it down as "Not considered a good, on-topic question" An example might be, what are the differences between git and mercurial, where the answer is not a line of code but may include informed judgments by the people whose judgments I'm most interested in. As a developer, I have to make a lot of decisions, and not all of them are about which characters to type. So I have to live with whatever answers well-informed SO members managed to sneak onto the page before they were chased away and the gate was locked. Does it seem to anyone else as though there might be something wrong when this happens over and over again?
- stevvooe 14y agoAt risk of being banned forever, yes, this has been my experience with the site since its inception. Judgement is one quality of a solid developer and SO fails to impart The additive judgement of its participants.
- codinghorror 14y ago+1 for providing an example, but "Git vs. Mercurial" belongs on someone's blog, or on Wikipedia as a comparison matrix. Now if you have a specific question about some aspect of Git compared to Mercurial, that can work on SE. But as a broad kitchen sink, catch-all, "compare these two giant things kthx", you'd end up with Gorilla vs. Shark. http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/gorilla-vs-shark/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/gorilla-vs-shark/
- barking 14y agoIf a question gets oodles of upvotes and answers that seems like a vote by the community to keep it open.
- icebraining 14y ago
- martinrd 14y agoI rubber duck A LOT. But instead of talking to a rubber duck, I talk to my girlfriend (we both work at home). It's an amazingly useful technique. This also reminds me of a House M.D. episode where House is on a plane without his team, so he has to get a regular person to talk to, to finally solve the case.
- nsns 14y agoInteresting fact about "rubberducking": orignally a Hollywood slang for explaining a character's psychological background as an alibi for everything it does ("Someone took his rubber duck when he was little, so now he kills people"). There's a good explanation in Sidney Lumet's Making Movies.
- joshsegall 14y agoOne from my workplace is "potato" as in "extremely low hanging fruit", features so easy and cheap to implement it's just like picking them up off the ground.
- nickm12 14y agoSuch a strange post. Jeff spend the first half arguing that the qualify of the second half somehow decrease the quality of Stack Overflow. I liked the second half better. I've never understood why Jeff and Joel felt these kinds of questions should be anathema on Stack Overflow. Most of the information on Stack Overflow exists in some form or other elsewhere. The value-add that Stack Overflow provides is community-based filtering and maintenance. Not only are these questions entertaining in their own right, but their very existence enhances the feeling of community on the site. Also, it wasn't as though they were using some off-the-shelf software to run the site. They could have provided an outlet for this kind of thing, which all communities want to do, within the context of the site.
- rickmb 14y agoEvery time when people get to rule their own kingdom and get to decide what's Right(TM) and Wrong(TM) this is what happens. It doesn't matter if it's informative, useful or, oh horror of horrors, entertaining, all that matters is that it is Right(TM) or Wrong(TM) in the eyes of those high on their power trip, and there is no point in debating it. And no Jeff, most communities don't just tend towards increased strictness over time, they tend towards death and abandonment, no matter how big they were at the height of their popularity. Stifling the natural development of a community because it doesn't match your "vision" rarely works out well, both online and IRL.
- SeanDav 14y agoI still think StackOverflow is one of the best sites out there for programming and development information, but I am increasingly finding that the posts that attracted me to StackOverflow in the first place are closed as not constructive by SO mods. These posts, almost inevitably have a significant number of replies and discussion. I actually think that it is rude and disrespectful to your community to shut a topic down that has nothing blatantly wrong with it (like flaming/cussing/banality) just because it isn't the correct "fit" and might (shocker) involve an opinion. I can't help wondering that if SO continues in this vein, how relevant it is going to be in the near future.
- username3 14y agoStack Overflow and Stack Exchange should promote good questions instead of closing or deleting questions. we don't have a good designated place for deleted "too fun" questions to live Make a good designated place for deleted "too fun" questions to live! StackOverflowOverflow.
- wangweij 14y agoI am not a native English speaker, can someone explain what "Counterbug (a bug you present when presented with a bug caused by the person presenting the bug)" means?
- danparsonson 14y agoI am a native English speaker and I'm having considerable trouble parsing that :-) I think the idea is: you report a bug in code that I wrote, and I (childishly) retaliate by reporting a bug in code that you wrote (the bug I report is then a 'Counterbug')
- MisterMerkin 14y agoRight. Think counter-terrorism.
- nathancahill 14y agoWhat's the lingo for a user that doesn't understand or can't follow the instructions from a techie? It's an error number, I forget which.
- krzysz00 14y agoIt's an ID10T error, though (IIRC) it's more tech supprot/sysadmin jargon.
- nathancahill 14y agoThanks!
- wissler 14y agocoffee mug bug: a bug you could have found by talking to your coffee mug rather than enlisting someone else's help.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- wayne62682 14y agoThe problem is when the question is closed and there isn't even any "Ask it here" type of answer it's just gtfo we don't want your kind. Ever since Joel shut down the old JoS board there has been NO good place just to discuss programming/IT things. The whole concept of SO is flawed because it encourages black and white answers, not discussion!
- wayne62682 14y agoThe big problem is there isn't any place to have a legit open discussion about IT things. Ever since Joel closed the old JoS board (due to him demanding everyone sign up), there isn't a place to shoot the shit. Half the questions that used to be asked on JoS aren't allowed on SO, and their black and white attitude towards what the site is and isn't makes it feel very unfriendly if you ask something that isn't on-topic, you get it closed without even being pointed to a better site, it's literally just telling you to GTFO and slamming the door in your face.
- satyap 14y agoI wanted to forward this to someone non-technical (a product manager, actually the CEO of this tiny startup I help with) and found myself explaining the yoda conditional, and then I wrote stuff about spectacular versus subtle failure, and the whole thing turned into a small blog post: http://www.thesatya.com/blog/2012/08/yoda_conditions.html http://www.thesatya.com/blog/2012/08/yoda_conditions.html