Posted to tcl by hypnotoad at Thu Nov 06 20:31:28 GMT 2014view raw
- I keep catching your segment on Trade Lingo, and would like to add a few of the more obscure terms I encounter as a computer programmer.
- It's said that the Inuit have many terms for snow. In the programming industry, we have many terms for computer bugs.
- A Heisenbug, for instance, goes away when you try to isolate it.
- A bug that is repeatable is a Bohr bug. A bug that's repeatable, but only at the right phase of the moon while holding a pencil in one's left hand while singing the star spangled banner in reverse we call a Mandelbug.
- Occasionally a bug exists, but it goes unnoticed until someone reviews the code. At which point the program stops working until that bug is fixed. We call that a Schroedinbug.
- A bug that comes in from the field, that the IT folks can't replicate, but we still get reports of from time to time we call a bigfoot.
- A horribly embarrassing, obvious, and public bug in a software release we call a brown-paper-bag-bug.
- And when you slay one bug, and two more spring forth, we call that the Hydra.
- And the realm between working code and non-working code isn't as clear as black and white. There are shades of grey.
- When developing new products, we often have to replicate misbehaviors in old products. Usually for hysterical reasons. We call that being "bug-for-bug compatible."
- And sometimes you can fix a bug with a workaround. And sometimes the workaround is so ugly we call it a kluge around. A kluge is a rube-goldberg-esque construction in software that tends to work, but maybe for not the right reason.
- Being hard at work fixing bugs we often abbreviate in texts and chats as "donuts". After the old Dunkin Donuts adds "It's time to make the donuts..."