14 Hilarious New Programming Jargon!

While working on one thing over the years, all of us make our own funny work jargon that becomes a part of our everyday communication. We came through one such funny list of jargon compiled by the co-founder of the question-and-answer website Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network, Jeff Atwood. Here are some of them for you, read out with your co programmers and have fun! Who knows you already share some of these!

1. Jimmy

A generalized name for the clueless/new developer. "What if Jimmy forgets to update the attribute?"

This led to the term: "Jimmy-proof" when referring to well designed framework code.

2. Refuctoring

The process of taking a well-designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anyone except yourself.

3. Yoda Conditions

Using if(constant == variable) instead of if(variable == constant), like if(4 == foo). Because it's like saying "if blue is the sky" or "if tall is the man".

4. Nopping

Nopping comes from assembler NOP for no-operation. It's similar to 'nap', but doesn't imply sleep, just zoning out. "Stanislav sat watching the screensaver and nopped for a while."

5. Unicorny

An adjective to describe a feature that's so early in the planning stages that it might as well be imaginary.

6. Baklava Code

Code with too many layers. Baklava is a delicious pastry made with many paper-thin layers of phyllo dough. While thin layers are fine for a pastry, thin software layers don’t add much value, especially when you have many such layers piled on each other.

7. Fear Driven Development

When project management adds more pressure (fires someone, moves deadlines forward, subtracts resources from the project, etc).

8. Hydra Code

Code that cannot be fixed. Like the Hydra of legend, every new fix introduces two new bugs. It should be rewritten.

9. Loch Ness Monster Bug

Anything not reproducible/only sighted by one person.

10. Ninja Comments

Also known as invisible comments, secret comments, or no comments.

11. Rubber Ducking

Sometimes, you just have to talk a problem out. You go to your boss and talk about something and he'd listen and then you will end up answering your own question and walk out without him saying a thing. So rather put a rubber duck on your monitor so you could talk to it. So rubberducking is talking your way through a problem.

12. Mad Girlfriend Bug

When you see something strange happening, but the software is telling you everything is fine.

13. Hooker Code

Code that is problematic and causes application instability (application "goes down" often). "Did the site go down again? Yeah, must still have some hooker code in there."

14. Higgs-Bugson

A hypothetical bug predicted to exist based on a small number of possibly related event log entries and vague anecdotal reports from users, but it is difficult (if not impossible) to reproduce on a dev machine because you don't really know if it's there, and if it is there what is causing it.