{"id":357,"date":"2005-04-30T19:57:00","date_gmt":"2005-04-30T19:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/?p=357"},"modified":"2005-04-30T19:57:00","modified_gmt":"2005-04-30T19:57:00","slug":"say-what-you-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/2005\/04\/30\/say-what-you-mean\/","title":{"rendered":"Say what you mean"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>HEY! Software developers! Yes, you. Wake up! <\/p>\n<p>An insiduous disease is spreading its way through the development community, leaving confusion in its wake.  No-one wants to talk about it &#8211; but someone&#8217;s got to take a stand.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m talking about <i>jargonitis<\/i>. <\/p>\n<p>Is your open-source project &#8220;designed to enhance the ability of the community to develop tools to plug into frameworks for the construction of software components?&#8221;  Are you &#8220;exploiting an extensible platform for hosting innovative software tools for the development of cross-platform components?&#8221;  Have you started a &#8220;revolutionary technology development platform to leverage an open source application framework?&#8221; If so, then I&#8217;m afraid you &#8211; yes, you &#8211; have been infected with jargonitis.<\/p>\n<p>The primary symptom of jargonitis is logorrhea: a runny stream of useless verbiage.  Word salsa like &#8220;designed to enhance the ability of the community to develop tools to plug into frameworks for the construction of software components&#8221; doesn&#8217;t <i>mean<\/i> anything &#8211; or, more accurately, doesn&#8217;t mean anything <i>more<\/i> than &#8220;improves plug-in development&#8221;. The extra blather actually drains the meaning that is there, until the point gets lost in a sea of undifferentied grey jargon, and readers of your project web site drift away.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Technology infrastructures for implementation frameworks&#8221; &#8211; feh! <br \/>Software comes in three major flavors: applications, tools, and platforms: <\/p>\n<ul><\/p>\n<li>Applications <i>do<\/i> something. <\/li>\n<li>Tools let you <i>make<\/i> something.  <\/li>\n<li>And platforms provide the <i>building blocks<\/i> out of which you build applications and tools. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So the next time I roll on to SourceForge, or Freshmeat, or Apache, or the Eclipse project home page, I want to hear about &#8220;visual editors for graphs&#8221; (applications that do something) or &#8220;IDEs for developing web applications&#8221; (tools for building things) or &#8220;APIs for collaborative applications&#8221; (platforms for building things on).  That&#8217;s right: write nice, clear, concrete descriptions that say what you fricking mean.<\/p>\n<p>If I see any more &#8220;technology projects to develop toolsets that leverage application frameworks&#8221; I&#8217;ll come smack ya.  <\/p>\n<p>You know who you are.<\/p>\n<p>-the Centaur<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>HEY! Software developers! Yes, you. Wake up! An insiduous disease is spreading its way through the development community, leaving confusion in its wake. No-one wants to talk about it &#8211;&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","ratio-2-1","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}