What jargon do you use among programmers in a non-work context?

Question

What expression do you "import" from programming while talking, in a non-work context, with other programmers?

Is "2.0" the only expression that made it into mainstream?

Answer 1

• "disambiguate"
• "orthogonal"
• "idempotent"
• "tedious and error-prone"

Answer 2

Dude, everything. A few:

ping (someone)

cache (an idea back into my head)

pop (a topic from the conversation stack)

...

Answer 3

I discovered that many people don't know what parse means. Used in a sentence:

"I cant parse what you are saying"

Answer 4

I'm constantly surrounded by programmers, it's hard to separate jargon from natural language.. That's probably why my girlfriend thinks I'm a nerd :)

Answer 5

• implement
• encapsulate
• agile
• cast ("I cast level 3 Guard!") jk, I don't even know what MTG is

Answer 6

• wtf?
• n00b
• lulz
• NullReferenceException

Answer 7

• bug as "it doesn't works"
• ping
• nerd as "smart", "cool"
• lol/rotfl in place of "ahahahahah"

Answer 8

Busy-waiting (e.g., Let's not all stand here and busy-wait until the conference room is free).

Brute force

DFS and BFS

Answer 9

This is difficult as most of these jargon words and phrases stem from non-programming concepts originally, so they don't necessarily sound out of place in isolation. It's more the frequency with which I use these in real life which marks me out as a programmer:

• Pattern
• Rationalize
• Normalize
• Robustness
• Debug
• Traversal
• Garbage-in-garbage-out
• First-in-first-out
• Reboot
• Class

Answer 10

• parse(which is simply an linguistics word that was brought into computer use)

• orthogonal(although this is a linear algebra(originally geometry) term)

• ping

In general, my speech patterns are more precise and literal than the average person I interact with. I have also made a conscious effort to speak "non-geek" when I am not speaking on work topics, for the purposes of clarity in communication to the average educated person.

Answer 11

Stackoverflow

Answer 12

call to fork() failed.

Answer 13

I find myself using logging for taking notes.

Answer 14

parse cache ping grep kill -9

Answer 15

"Overloaded", as in "They've overloaded the use of the word..."

Answer 16

Interface and Exception Jokes.

Such as in:

"I'm gonna take a core dump"

reply: "TooMuchInformationException"

Answer 17

I have a programmer friend who uses "return from interrupt" after being sidetracked (or, more often, sidetracking himself) and returning to the original topic of discussion.

Answer 18

I have a tendency to use names for some of the funny punctuation that come from geeky sources, such as discussions of Unix commands and pipes, as well as some borrowed from too much time playing rogue, hack, and nethack...

People look at me funny when I refer to ! as "bang", but they get it quickly. Clarifying which of < and > I meant by calling it an up or down staircase only muddies the waters unless there are other rogue-like players in the conversation.

Most people don't seem to know the correct names for | and # so calling them "pipe" and "hash" seems to not raise too many eyebrows. And it seems that "twiddle" for ~ is accepted without a murmur most of the time.

Answer 19

'F'

Like when I'm trying watch a DVD with more than the usual number of anti-piracy warnings, previews, bonus features, and what-not: "Just PTFM!"

Answer 20

"Could you hand me a pen?"

"404, Not Found"

Answer 21

cycles, as in "I don't have the cycles to handle your request right now". See also: bandwidth.

Answer 22

String.

When I point and some text and say something like "This string here means...", no one knows what I'm talking about.

As others have mentioned, "parse".

Answer 23

"It's on the table somewhere."

"Can you give me an index, or am I going to have to do a full table scan?"

Yes, my wife does a lot of DBA work, including query optimization.

Answer 24

I use string, double and some other datatypes in my everyday talk. I also use parse.

Answer 25

Heard this one on the place I work:

"My car should have a flag that enables it to park anywhere"

Answer 26

"Would you like fries or a salad with that?"

Just give me the default.

Answer 27

Maybe not import into, but maybe a back import". "stack overflow".

No layperson has any clue when encountering such an error message.

Easiest explanation I've come to is to ask an analogue, "It's 10PM, do you know where you're kids are?", when the supposed answer is 'no':

The kids are the stack, and we need them to run the future and protect the past, but we don't know where they are.

Answer 28

One and only one, and I didn't even notice I was doing it until someone asked me what it meant:

Debug