Posted to tcl by hypnotoad at Thu Nov 06 20:31:28 GMT 2014view raw

  1. 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.
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  3. It's said that the Inuit have many terms for snow. In the programming industry, we have many terms for computer bugs.
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  5. A Heisenbug, for instance, goes away when you try to isolate it.
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  7. 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.
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  9. 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.
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  11. 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.
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  13. A horribly embarrassing, obvious, and public bug in a software release we call a brown-paper-bag-bug.
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  15. And when you slay one bug, and two more spring forth, we call that the Hydra.
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  17. And the realm between working code and non-working code isn't as clear as black and white. There are shades of grey.
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  19. 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."
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  21. 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.
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  23. 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..."
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