The Forked IT Dictionary - Part E

(Reborn from a long ago blog post)

Encapsulation: The making of pills. A similar process can be applied to software by wrapping it up in a container to stop it spilling out all over the place. The idea was stolen from the transport industry where it  was called containerization. Recently the programming crowd adopted the container word to describe big clumps of software.  It has become a religious term and is now part of the software developers creed.

Error Message: A terse message displayed to the computer user along with a meaningless number which is deliberately designed to confuse. For example: Err 671: Keyboard not present – Press F1 to continue.

Escape Key: Novice PC users often think this is a “get out of jail free” card. It isn’t. It won’t help you escape from anything beyond a menu list. This key was added to the PC keyboard along with Alt and Ctrl to  confuse PC users. Alt didn’t alter anything, Control didn’t control anything and Escape didn’t escape anything. Brilliant. Take a bow, IBM.

Extreme Programming: Suicide programming. This  is yet another programming technique/philosophy which has failed to improve the quality of software. Peppered with archaic and recycled ideas, such as: “the project is divided into iterations” and “code must be written to agreed standards”, its major innovation is its name, which implies that programming can be exciting. It can’t.