Programming Jargon or Terms d'art (duck punching, etc)

Question

monkey patching, duck typing, and even duck punching are common terms d'art in the ruby world. What other fun terms have you come across while discussing code with other programmers? I'm not aware of many outside the ruby space, except perhaps $foo (to mean any substituted idea, like "my current $boss is pissing me off" or some such).

FWIW:

monkey patching => opening up some class (you typically didn't write) to add functionality to it after the fact

duck typing => Ruby isn't strongly typed, so the idea is if it quacks like a duck, it must be a duck (if classes A and B both have the method 'quack', then they're both ducks)

duck punching => using monkey patching and duck typing to make an ass out of yourself.

Note: this differs from this other thread in that I'm looking for commonly-used terms, not ones you've invented yourself (although if you inveted a commonly used term, feel free to share it!)

Answer 1

automagic => An action that is performed by some means of programming voodoo or to simulate a cloud of mystery around the performance of the action.

Example: "The notifications are sent automagically by this piece of software."