I get a lot of stuff from eWeek in my inbox (don’t ask), but this morning’s email lead me to despair.
eWEEK takes a look not at the nifty applications programmers have cooked up, but at the new trend in slang for today’s programmers. This list, inspired by the Stack Overflow Web site and the Global Nerdy Web blog, includes such gems as the “Mad Girlfriend” bug, the “Drug Report,” bug bait and ghetto code. If you are a programming nerd, you will know how to speak this language.
The subject line said: “Master Geekspeak: Cracking Code-Jockey Jargon”.
I immediately felt nostalgic. Back in junior high and high school, I used to kill time in class by writing small routines in Z80 machine code. No, I do not mean assembly. I mean, I was trying to memorize the opcode table, so I would write stuff like DB 00 47 DB 01 80 D3 00 C9 on scraps of paper while the teacher talked about this, that, and the other.
It turns out, so called geekspeak has changed in the intervening years. I went through their presentation slide-by-slide, and let me tell you, it was no Jargon file.
You mean “banana banana banana” has replaced the venerable “lorem ipsum?” Barack Obama is a Code-Jockey term? We are supposed to say “bugfoot” instead of a Heisenbug? “Baklava code” instead of spaghetti code?
Give me a break!
I guess this is what a code monkey wannabe thinks real programmers must talk like.
Head on over to The Daily WTF. No soup for you Darryl K. Taft!