StackOverflow has a fantastic list of programming terms that have been coined by the development community recently. Some of the best, most appropriate terms are documented below.
- Automanually
- Used to refer to a batch job or application that should be scheduled or triggered automatically, but due to unspecified reasons requires manual intervention every time. (not the same as automagically)
- Boolean Zen
- The proper practice of using boolean expressions directly without testing for equality to true or false.
- Common Law Feature
- A bug in the application that has existed for so long that it is now part of the expected functionality.
- Disaster Driven Development
- When Your PMs and salesmen promised that You will build a "space shuttle" in one month.
- Egyptian Brackets
- Describes the god-awful c-style where curly-braces are not aligned.
- Heisenbug
- An oldie, but still valuable…describes a bug that disappears or changes when put under scrutiny.
- Higgs-Bugson
- a hypothetical bug predicted to exist based on a small number of possibly related event log entries and other anecdotal evidence.
- Hindenbug
- A catastrophic, data destroying bug.
- Jimmy
- a generalized name for a low-level developer (n00b).
- Nopping
- From the assembler instruction NOP (no operation). Similar to nap but doesn’t imply sleep, just zoning out.
- Object Oriented Pasta
- Used to describe spaghetti code wrapped in classes to make it look like an object.
- Perl-Grade Obfuscation
- The highest level of code obfuscation possible. Better than passing code through a 1-way hash function.
- Refuctoring
- the process of taking a well-designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anyone except yourself.
- Rubberducking
- The process of talking your own way through a problem, as if talking to a rubber duck.
- Scar Tissue
- Any code that is commented out but still included in the current and/or checked-in version.
- Smurf Naming Convention
- When almost every class has the same prefix. IE, when a user clicks on the button, a SmurfAccountView passes a SmurfAccountDTO to the SmurfAccountController. The SmurfID is used to fetch a SmurfOrderHistory which is passed to the SmurfHistoryMatch…
- Stringly Typed
- One of the antitheses of strongly typed. It describes an implementation that uses strings where more strongly-type options are available.
- Try, Catch, Forget
- An empty catch block, no tracing, not even a comment. No attempt to resolve the error and of course the catch block is not at all specific on the exception type.