New-Age Programming Jargon

MAR 14	New-Age Programming Jargon StumbledUpon this thread on StackOverflow and thought I might share some of the more priceless gems. Users were asked to respond to: What programming terms have you coined that have taken off in your own circles (i.e. have heard others repeat it)? It might be within your own team, workplace or garnered greater popularity on the Internet. [...] This question serves in the spirit of communication among programmers through sharing of terminology with each other, to benefit us by its propagation within our own teams and environments. Yoda Conditions Using if(constant == variable) instead of if(variable == constant), like if(4 == foo). Because it's like saying "if blue is the sky" or "if tall is the man". What really got me hyucking here was a comment by one Michael Myers: Isn't "Yoda Programming" where you never handle exceptions? Because, you know, there is no "try". Egyptian Brackets Probably more common than most people think, this phrase was coined to describe the K&R style used in the book The C Programming Language, by Kernighan and Ritchie. A Duck A feature added for no other reason than to draw management attention and be removed, thus avoiding unnecessary changes in other aspects of the product. This started as a piece of Interplay corporate lore. It was well known that producers (a game industry position, roughly equivalent to PMs) had to make a change to everything that was done. The assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didn't, they weren't adding value. The artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen's animations, had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that it never overlapped the "actual" animation. Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were done, he turned to the artist and said, "that looks great. Just one thing - get rid of the duck." Doctype Decoration When web designers add a doctype declaration but don't bother to write valid markup. Hot potato / Hot potatoes By far my favorite. Http and Https repsectively. Same number of syllables, but more fun to say. Be sure to check out the SO thread for more comedy gold, mostly for developers and sysadmins, but hey!
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