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Easy For You to Say
I remember the first time I was working in assembler, I had a question to a friend.
"You must remember that you are working with Big Indian now," he said.
Big Indian? Like Tonto? I looked around. There wasn't a big Indian that I could see.
Later on I realized my friend was talking about Big Endian which is a way to order bytes inside a computer system.
IT has a lot of jargon -- there's a lot of technical stuff in there -- and sometimes the words we use have real connotations. Talk about enough to make your head spin!
C++ is one of my favorites for this.
When I was a technical reviewer for a C++ book several years ago, many times it seemed like the author was more concerned in impressing the reader and less concerned about introducing his concepts.
"Always be aware that some of these methods may be volatile," the text read. Volatile? Nobody told me about potentially explosive computers. Should I type lightly on the keyboard when working with these functions?
When code can "see" other code, sometimes there is a condition called "friends". I like the idea of my code having "friends". Friends are good for people. When I derive a class from another class, we use "inheritance". Hey, I've always wanted an inheritance; it's about time I got one.
But what about my friends? Sometimes when you get an inheritance, you get a lot of friends you don't want. Thank goodness C++ has this covered: friends of the child are not necessarily friends of the parent. (Good thing to remember). That makes sense: my folks didn't like some of my friends either.
And let's not forget my friend, that great chick from OOP, Poly Morphism. When I first heard about Poly, she could make all kinds of magic happen in my programs. Hype was a little more than actuality, though, and Poly has a lot of tendencies we have to watch out for, including slicing (A very bad thing to do!)
Java has it's own language double-entendres. One of my favorites is "packages" which Java code comes in. One supposes you must go to the package store to get new ones.
When I first started coding in Oracle I had an error "Mutating tables present" or some such. Yikes! I certainly don't want mutant tables running around in my database; they might touch off some of that volatile code!
These are the ones that come to mind -- if you think of any more, let me know! It would make for a nice future article.
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