New Programming Jargon

@John, I pretty much only work alone except if I’m answering people’s questions and/or tracking down the bugs in their code. And I don’t care about the grammar, I just find it impossible to read when the brackets are all over the place, so I clean that up too.

Follymorphism, something that uses instanceof to do something that should have used polymorphism.

I like “Ignorance is Bliss” code. This is when you don’t know much about the system you’re working on yet, but take it upon yourself to “refactor” a significant piece of business logic. It might not be under test, but what could go wrong when moving it into a new module, renaming it, extracting all of the logic into new methods, and adding parameters to its constructor? Nothing, right?

Agreed with squidseer - #27 is not good jargon. It’s sexist, and to some extent so is #29. Don’t see what’s so funny about them.

I’ve mostly only ever seen Java code Egyptian style.

I often use a variant on the Yoda conditional, to prevent null pointer exceptions:

"Some string".equals(aBean.getMightBeNullButDontCareString());

Back Seat Programming (BSP) is one fairly recently coined by a team that I was in. It starts as pair programming, but in occasional situations involves three people. This arrangement quickly devolves into the back seat programmer incessantly heckling the two front seat programmers, particularly the one doing the typing.

It has become a permanent addition to our vocabulary.

@js, other people think that clean code is when the brackets line up. They’re not wrong. Neither are you. Personally, I really don’t even have a preference. Whatever convention that seems to be present is the right one, for me. I’d rather just create something than be bothered by nonsense like that. I do like the term “egyptian brackets” though.

" or if you have the requisite 10k rep on Stack Overflow, you can view the full soft-deleted question on the site"

Some of the archived ‘fun’ questions should be left in this soft-deleted state, just to add an entertainment enticement for reaching the 10,000 mark.

We use the term “Stebugging” internally to describe the process of finding and fixing code errors caused by our enthusiastic junior dev Stephen…

Wait, so this blog is creative commons as well? Can everybody else just grab quality material from SO and post it on their blog? Cause all I can see is “Content © Jeff Atwood” at the bottom…

Step 1: Build an awesome community tool that attracts millions of programmers

Step 2: Close down any question that’s too popular or, god forbid, fun.

Step 3: Post same question on own blog…

Did you guys at SE ever think about making a SE specifically for stuff that was off-topic but fun/good? Just migrate all such posts from all of the SE’s and SO to this particular SE. Could call it offtopic.stackexchange.com

I my world, Rubber Ducking is “Potato Pairing”.

You ask someone to help with a problem and you figure it out through the process of explaining the problem. Instead of asking a human, you could have saved trouble and paired with a potato instead.

@Félix Cloutier

You can, in fact, make assignments in IF statements easily in most of the languages you listed. I’d never thought of using ‘yoda conditionals’ to prevent it, but it would work. If you wrap the assignment in ()s it is valid, this would happen if you are bracketting multi conditionals.

if ( (a == null) || (a < b) )
if ( (a = null) || (a < b) )

both valid, one of those does an assignment.

On the other hand, there’s the problem of communities that are too forgiving to newcomers. Reddit post-digg-migration is a perfect example of a community that should’ve been tougher on newcomers. Instead, we were all too busy basking in our own popularity before we realized that it was too late to educate millions of new redditors on proper rediquette.

I think SO has struck a good balance of not being too loose on rules but also not scaring off newcomers. (And today, there’s programmers, workplace, UNIX etc. StackExchanges for anything off-topic anyway).

I often talk about the dreadful “leaning Eiffel tower”. It’s a lot of if()'s nested that resemble an Eiffel tower laying on the ground.

It’s often a symptom of having the conditions nested at the wrong level so you end up testing something repeatedly in different branches.

I used to use “a duck” with my dad when a kid and had to tidy my room, I soon learnt that no matter how good a job I did he would always pick up on something that could be done better, in time I used to leave something easy for him to pick up on that I could quickly change!

“Fragile” - A software project using traditional “waterfall” lifecycle but called “agile” by the project managers.

Fear driven development isn’t when they subtract resources from the project - it’s when they add them (and normally new hires at that).

Any good jargon for the practice of using a (D)VCS as your personal save-every-three-minutes notepad, as revealed by a string of commits such as:
“10:23: Finished $FOO”
“10:26: Forgot temp. print”
“10:29: Oops”
“10:31: Will I ever get this right”
“10:34: One more fix”

So basically you removed the content from stack overflow and put it here for page views. Doesn’t seem right to me.

How about creating a stack overflow section for questions like these? http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/73455/popular-deleted-questions-list

I shouldn’t have to need 10k to be able to see them. But creating a new section was too obvious for you, wasn’t it? You just had to delete them. smh