Carrier: A word that describes an individual that spreads diseases and starts epidemics. Also “carrier signal”: a message from such an individual; and “carrier grade”: a term used to describe such individuals who are reliably infectious.
CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering): Once upon a time software developers believed that you could write fully functional programs just by drawing diagrams. They invented software tools to do exactly that. They called them Computer Aided Software Engineering tools or CASE tools for short. They didn’t work – but it was art.
CISC: CISC stands for Complex Instruction Set Computer, which is strange because it actually refers to a type of computer chip. As everyone knows a computer chip on its own is not a computer, so CISC is a misabbreviation, or it would be, if misabbreviation was a word, which it isn’t.
Commit: When databases first came into use, a whole set of new terminology was invented to confuse developers into believing that something impressive was going on. Instead of just writing data away to a file, they had to “commit” it. It was quite clear what this meant. The data was mad. It was a danger to itself and to other data. We didn’t like what we were doing but we had no choice. We had to lock it away in the darkest reaches of a database, where it would never see the light of day again.
Computer languages:
- APL: A programming language that is remembered only because it used the initials of A Programming Language for its name.
- Assembler: In the dark ages of computing, before the days of databases and Doom, programmers assembled lists of machine instructions in order to produce a program. Assembler wasn’t a programming language, just a list of machine instructions. Programs written in assembler were impossible to read, awkward to write, difficult to understand and damn near impossible to debug. This gave programmers great power.
- C: A cryptic computer language specifically designed for power crazed programmers that mourn the waning of assembler. It was the world’s first write-only language.
- C++: With the advent of Object Orientation, in the late 1980s, Bjarne Stroustrup decided that it was time to improve the C language. He added some OO features and renamed the language. Instead of naming the new language D, he wittily called it C++, using a convention in the C language (++) to indicate that the language had been incremented. Hilarious. How we all laughed.
- COBOL: A programming language invented by a woman on the basis of writing programs as recipes. First we name the dish, then we add the data and then we mix in some procedure, etc. etc.
- Java: A programming language that pays homage to the enormous amount of coffee that programmers drink.
- Pascal: A programming language named after Blaise Pascal, the French Mathematician and Philosopher, with the idea that it would attract the intelligent and cultured members of the developer community. It did and that’s why it bombed.
- Python: A programming language named for a British comedy show. This is believed to be the most important contribution the Brits have made to computing since Turing.
- R: A programming language based on the idea that statisticians think they can write programs. This and nothing else accounts for its popularity.
- SNOBOL: A programming language that never caught on, except in programmer-written limericks, where it provides a tidy rhyme for the word COBOL.
- Z. The last language on anyone's list, and hence rarely used.
Content Management:
The art of not throwing up when you’re blind drunk and wasted.
Critical Success Factor: Meaningless management-speak. In recent years the IT industry has adopted such management-speak in order to sell technology. IT now uses management-speak extensively. It is a critical success factor in establishing credibility.
Cursor: What the pointer was called before it was eaten by a mouse.