Jargon: postfix

As a guild of craftsmen, we software developers, should be aware of our jargon when talking to others. The jargon can distract from the intention you're trying to convey. One term that I accidentally stumbled upon was 'postfix'. I was creating a method that concatenated  prefix + term + postfix. While writing the code I started wondering if I should have used the term 'suffix' instead of 'postfix'.

 [JARGON++]

Probably I used the term post(fix), because it's a great contrast to pre. Still I was dumbfounded to discover that postfix is a term specifically originating from our field of computer programming (e.g. postfix operators: expr++ and expr-- ). Suffix on the other hand originated in linguistics, a long time ago.

So long story short; don't start an argument with that linguist machine learning colleague of yours, you probably both mean the same thing.

Sources:
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/81263/postfix-or-suffix
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/postfix
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/nutsandbolts/operators.html


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Deep fakes, fake news, it's old news!

Image
The advances of AI and cheap compute power allow us to automate the making of “fake” media texts. Deepfake media generally points to media texts (e.g. audio, pictures and videos) portraying (celebrity) persona in events that have never taken place. The term deepfake references the use of deep learning to create the fake. The interconnectedness of the internet allows us to disseminate media texts with unparalleled speed and depth into (social) networks. Articles with false information disseminate with the same ease. The term “fake news” points to any type of “news” article containing false information. Some are spread with the intent to disinform. Don’t panic! Creating fakes and false information are not new. The spreading of false news as a (political) strategy has happened since at least the 13th century BC . Creating imitation pieces, like deepfakes, is probably equally old. The concept has been formulated as early as 100 BC .  The widespread availability of digital methods t...
Read more

Thinking about tech: Technological Determinism

Technology changes the world. Technology improves our lives. Just look at the Black Lives Matters movement. Social Media will drive the change of society to finally get rid of racism. It is the power of social media that drives this change. Technology marches in seven-league boots from one ruthless, revolutionary conquest to another, tearing down old factories and industries, flinging up new processes with terrifying rapidity. by Charles A. Beard The many grave fallacies in the paragraph above show technological determinism in all its reductionist crudeness. Technological determinism is the belief that technology is the main (positive) force that steers the direction of society. It reduces the full complexity of society to a crude [ technology > societal effect ] vision of history and societal change. The Medium is the Message by Marshall McLuhan From left to right, Karl Marx's idea, that fast-changing technologies alter human lives, is pervasive...
Read more

Software development as a growing profession - Present

Image
Software development is a growing profession. In three blog posts I’ll take a glance at the past, present and future of software development. This post looks at the amount of software developers today (2020). Today there are an estimated 23 million computer programmers, up to 26,5 million . Of these programmers, 15.5 million are professional software developers. The number still grows with 20% each year.  (I f you regress the number of programmers with a yearly growth factor of 1.2 (20%), you end up with a tidy 8 pro’s and 11 total programmers in 1940 .)  In other words, the number of developers doubles in less than 4 years. This means that on average 1 in 6 developers has less than 1 year of experience. Almost 1 in 3 developers has less than two years of experience. Over 2 in 5 developers has less than three years of experience. And to point out the obvious, half of all developers have less than 4 years of experience. This estimation seems to be confirmed by developers th...
Read more