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Stuck in a dull conference? You need Verity's survival guide
Getting your own back on technical seminar speakers
Pattern: Fizz-Buzz
Motivation: Speaker needs to add credibility to whatever programming technique he is pushing
Intent: The key has a strong awareness of which words and phrases are currently fashionable.
Implementation: This brief extract from a recent talk demonstrates the point:
Talk giver, hitting a climax: ...so you see, you can use this approach to inject a functional approach into an existing framework.
Delegate, raising arm: Isn't that very object-oriented?
Talk giver, hastily: Oh, no. It's not object-oriented. It's not object-oriented at all. It's very fluent and lightweight.
Delegate subsides, satisfied and impressed.
Examples: Long ago, the writer heard Bjarne Stroustrup himself complain that "object-oriented" had become a marketing synonym for "good". Many clichés have coursed through the culvert since then, and now it has become a coded term for "old-fashioned" - which is pretty much the same as "bad", to one decimal place.
It is not enough, then, for a speaker to speak in buzzing-words and fizzing-phrases. The key is to be aware of how much of their credibility remains to be spent, and to avoid worn-out terms loaded with non-technical debt.
Here is a small kut-out-'n'-keep table of examples, current as of writing, to get you started:
Jargon | Credibility
(1.0 best, -1.0 worst) |
agile | -0.17 |
design by contract | -0.82 |
data-driven | -0.76 |
fluent | 0.97
|
functional | 0.95
|
injection | 0.65
|
inside-out/outside-in | 0.32
|
lightweight | 0.57
|
native | 0.81
|
object-oriented | -0.84
|
pattern | -0.13
|
performant | -0.21
|
pushback | 0.77
|
seam
|
0.93
|
technical debt
|
0.16
|
test-driven
|
0.12
|
top-down/bottom-up | -0.72
|
unit test (as noun)
|
0.36
|
unit test (as verb)
|
0.43
|
virtual
|
-0.53
|
Observation: What's that Sooty? This whole article depends on the jargon word "pattern", and you have shown it to be a spent force?
Aaargh, you got me. ®