Terminology Memes

The girlfriend is worried about her partner thinking of another woman, but he's actually deep in philosophical programming territory: if text is called a "string" (a sequence of characters), shouldn't a single character be called a "strand"? It's the kind of shower thought that keeps developers up at night. The terminology actually comes from early computing where strings were literally sequences of characters "strung together," but nobody bothered to make the naming convention perfectly consistent with the singular form. Classic programming nomenclature being delightfully arbitrary.

Someone finally said it. While everyone's out here calling themselves "coders" and doing "coding bootcamps," there's this one person who had to remind us that the proper term is "programming." Because apparently "coding" has become the TikTok-ified version of what we do—like calling yourself a "content creator" instead of "unemployed with a Ring light." The suggestions for "not-vibe-coding" are pure gold though. "Boomer coding" hits different when you realize half of us still write code like it's 1995. "Chewgy coding" for that millennial energy of over-engineering everything. "Trad coding" for when you refuse to use frameworks and insist on writing everything from scratch. And "Coding with capital C" is just chef's kiss—because if you're gonna gatekeep, might as well go full grammatical pedant. But the reply? *Chef's kiss intensifies.* Declaring "coding" an infantilizing word and anointing "programming" as the noble profession is the kind of pretentious energy that makes you simultaneously roll your eyes and nod in agreement. We're not just slapping semicolons together, we're *engineering solutions*. Or at least that's what we tell ourselves at 3 AM debugging a null pointer exception.

The evolution of tech vocabulary is brutal! Back in the day, we had precise terminology like "application," "program," and "operating system." Now? Everything's just an "app." Need to compile code? There's an app for that. Running a critical system daemon? Just another app, bro. Even your meticulously crafted shell scripts? Yep, apps. It's like watching your carefully organized toolbox get dumped into a single drawer labeled "stuff that does things." The smug face in the corner is every marketing department that successfully convinced us precision is overrated. Who needs technical accuracy when you can have simplicity?

Remember when we had specific terminology for different software components? Now marketing departments have decided everything is just an "app." Your compiler? App. Your operating system? App. That daemon running critical background processes? You guessed it—app. Next time someone asks what I do for a living, I'm just going to say "I make apps" and save us all 20 minutes of technical explanation that would've been ignored anyway.

The awkward moment when the game show host realizes all four answers are technically correct in programming contexts: Master-slave (the problematic database/device relationship pattern) Deforestation (removing trees from expression trees in functional programming) Children (those poor innocent DOM nodes) STD (Standard Template Library in C++, not what you're thinking) And this is why we're renaming everything in tech. The host's face says it all: "Did I just walk into the world's most uncomfortable tech interview?"