njones / unfortunately-named-programming-terms

Unfortunately-Named Programming Terms

Because programming would be hard enough if we had good names for things. I mean seriously. For an activity that requires such relentless, fastidious precision of its practitioners, it's miraculous we can even communicate at all.

If you've ever tried teaching programming to beginners, maybe you've noticed. Or maybe this is the first time you're deliberately considering how overloaded our terms of art are, and are maybe surprised by what you find.

Either way, welcome!

Hope you find this interesting, and please feel welcome to contribute.

Note: documentating != proposing replacement

Without further ado:

term	meanings	issues
key	unique value allowing efficient lookup of associated values (e.g. in a map, datastore, etc.) (non-unique) attribute of data in a collection by which it can be ordered, grouped, etc. a secret value used for encryption/decryption/authentication a public value used for encryption and authentication	overloaded, difficult to google the metaphor works for symmetric key crypto ("only those with the key can lock/unlock access") but only causes confusion for public key crypto ("I give my key out to everyone?")
value	the value that a key (e.g. in a map) is associated with any data (e.g. that can be stored in a variable)	overloaded, difficult to google
set	to assign a value a collection of unique elements	overloaded, difficult to google
map	to apply a function to a collection of of elements a data structure associating keys with values	overloaded, difficult to google
class
type
object
heap	a pool of memory managed by an allocator a type of tree-based data structure	overloaded, difficult to google because a heap-tree is typically allocated on the heap, and a memory heap is itself implemented with some sort of a data structure
constant	a hard-coded value or 'magic number'. typically a literal expression. possibly even a value computed at compile-time ('constexpr') an attribute of an access path to a value, through which the value cannot be modified. However the value itself might be mutable	if you have a 'constant', it would be reasonable to assume that its value will remain constant, rather than being inadvertently modified by some other piece of code which holds a mutable reference to the data. ambiguous synonyms: - immutable (D, transitive) - persistent (Clojure, intransitive) - final (Java, intransitive) - frozen (JavaScript, intransitive) - readonly (C#, intransitive)