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A long time ago I joined a new remote-first company and in my first month they made an event where they brought in all employees from all over the world for a week at a farm hotel for a mix or meetings and leisure activities.
In one specific meeting the CEO was talking app this app that and I was very confused. The product was a server side program that had a web client, an electron app and two native mobile apps. But the CEO was talking about things that didn’t make sense for those apps.
At some point I interrupted the meeting and asked for clarification: what are you talking about when you say app? It’s not the mobile apps?
The CEO made a funny face and mentioned an engineer. I looked at him and he had a smug face and said something along the lines of “well, go on, explain it”. CEO then explained he was talking about the new big project, which was basically an extension system for the server product - and the extensions would be called apps.
That night I found that engineer at the hotel bar and asked more details about it. Turns out he was the team lead on this project and he hated the term “apps” for it and had been very vocal about it before, saying among other things that it would cause confusion with the client apps we have. Most of the company agreed with him at the time but the CEO demanded it be named apps anyway.
These days everyone there thinks that naming it apps was the right call, but I always hated having to refer to them as “server extension app” to avoid any confusion, specially because I often worked on integrations with third party tools and those tools also had their own stuff called apps so instead of just saying something like “the Kabum extension” I had to say “the ChaChin server Kabum app” (as in this example’s context there would also be multiple Kabum clients and ChaChin clients that would all be known as apps too)
at a farm hotel
A what now?
but the CEO demanded it
Typical.
I simply translated literally a term that exists in my language and didn’t realize it wasn’t really a thing in English.
A farm hotel is a hotel that is focused on leisure activities, usually connected to nature and often established in what would otherwise have been a farm. They tend to have ponds and lots of trees, flowers and sometimes animals too. They tend to also have areas for private events so that companies can bring their folks to stay there for a few days for meetings and presentations.
The one we were at had access to some pristine rivers where we could practice snorkeling, had some beautiful grottos we could enter, some trails for walking through the woods and also access to other rivers for several water sports. Some of those were provided by the hotel itself and others were general touristic attractions from that region.
I would have recommended an extension to interface with a mobile browser extension.
The Mobile Extension App Extension App.
I hate that this meme never explains what application meant ‘back then’
I get that it’s a problem now, but if it had a clear enough definition back then, maybe this couldn’t have occurred the way it did?I always understood “application” like a gadget in the software world that just resolved one specific problem, and had that own definition till got distorted
Web browser? “app”. Web page? “app”. Dialog box? “app”. Phone app that’s just a thin shell for the web site? “appapp”.
Appetizer at Applebee’s? “app”
This one probably drives me the most crazy.
Does your app have an app for its app?
Make it stop!
I call everything a script. Makes the Java devs real mad. Makes the PM’s super confused.
A million-line project spread over a hundred files
It’s a script!
sqlite is technically just one C source file, so that’s definitely a script.
The compiled binary being another script.
Just in a different language.Being one source file is the definition of a script?
Wait, so the
bashscript that I broke down into multiple files because I was unable to create and use functions properly, could not be considered a script?It’s now just a bash
Guess, I’ll be
bashing my way to completion.
The definition of a script is something the computer executes (if it’s a computer script, of course). Everything else people shove into it is extraneous.
In a sense it is, before it gets compiled. And yes I’m using the term loosely, please don’t @ me people
GNU Autotools: yes.
They hate to hear it.
Vitally…
Then: Books, Movies, Videos, Blogs, Articles Now: C O N T E N T
It’s not the word, it’s the reductionism.
We used to call all those media except people naturally didn’t want to lump them all together.
Then: Fire, Rocks
Man, I hate the word content.
I’m content with it
Product is a word I hate.
I have a warehouse full of product.
I mean unless you’re a drug smuggler… Then that’s fine. But using it for random lawn mower parts is dumb I think.
Haha thank you for that.
Yeah, me too. What the fuck is content? Content means contained in something. Contained in what?
Also, “content creator” = OnlyFans
Contained in the app you use, video you watch, article you read, page of a book, sentence in a paragraph, etc.
Me too. Ever since I read Richard Stallman’s words to avoid article. I kinda wish I hadn’t read it now lmao.
Man, what a nice read
I’ll definitely read it start to end when I have the time later, for now this is my favourite part of the article (Of the parts I skimmed through):
“Bullshit generators” is a suitable term for large language models (“LLMs”) such as ChatGPT, that generate smooth-sounding verbiage that appears to assert things about the world, without understanding that verbiage semantically.
App is actually correct for all but the OS.
Everything is a file
I mean, with virtualization that’s pretty much true
What about a process? File gone wild?
Why not? Represented in /proc? exec() and fam? Read and write to it?
I’d call that a file loaded to memory
Most files are loaded to memory in order to make any kind of use out of them. I.e. read/write operations.
That’s true! I supposed it would be more precise to say that all processes are files loaded to memory, but not all files loaded to memory are processes. Sort of like the whole arachnids / spiders situation.
What about a folder?
If you can open it in Vim, it’s a file.
You can open me in Vim, Greg. Am I a file?
Pregonte file
Is that how babby formed
how to mkdir
Files are just streams. Everything is just a stream, in real life too.
linux app download free no registration
And now the kids don’t know what a file path is anymore. Legit my wife is a professor, and she gets adeer in the headlight look when she is helping students debug code and she mentions a file path not being right in there code.
Serious response, no joke… what’s a file path?
These are sophomores and Juniors in college.
the blank stares you get when mentioning the word “directory”
Must not… Must resist… THEEEIIIIRRRR
Whew
I think they meant “a file path not being right in that there code”.
These are sophomores and Juniors in college.
… Who grew up in a world where computer internals were abstracted away so you never needed to know what a file was or even that they exist. I wouldn’t know what a file was either if I didn’t grow up in exactly the right time frame and have a dad who hoarded DOS PCs.
Oh no, I get why they don’t know what one is. It just makes teaching coding to them very difficult.
I lucked out having a dad who’s into computers so I had the chance to tinker with his old stuff since I was a little bwoah.
deleted by creator
Meh every generation has its quirks. My college class in 2000 spent 1 whole week going over the Windows Start menu…
All the education invalidated by the release of Windows 8
Yikes. Blame iPhone (and Android) hiding file structure in most every app
I fought hard against that for years. I still only use ‘app’ for phone programs, but I stopped correcting people every time they used the term for anything else. It isn’t technically wrong, but it grates on my nerves for some reason.
If someone told me to use the fdisk app I’d be confused.
Use the ls app.
Then use the cd app.
Then use the cd app.
❯ which cd cd: shell built-in commandNot even technically correct, unless…
When I press ‘Reply’, I am using the Reply app
Ugh I don’t know why but this was the one that got me. Just no.
Language evolves. Why is a computer program not an “app(lication)” exactly?
Everyone that goes " thats fire yo!" I spritz with a spraybottle.
As is your right and duty.
Oh, it is. It is… Sigh.
A lot of times, the literal definition varies from what people think of when they hear a thing. We call a lot of similar things words that don’t fully make sense but since other people will know what it means, it’s useful. When everything is an app, piles of specifics are glossed over. That probably doesn’t matter when talking to a non-developer, but sometimes it might. Those of us in software like the specificity because it tells us many things we might otherwise have to ask several questions to learn about. So yeah, sometimes it matters, other times it won’t.
It isn’t technically wrong
Yeah, I thought I made that clear. I just don’t like it.
Windows is the first thing I can think of that used the word “application” in that way, I think even back before Windows could be considered an OS (and had a dependency on MS-DOS). Back then, the Windows API referred to the Application Programming Interface.
Here’s a Windows 3.1 programming guide from 1992 that freely refers to programs as applications:
Common dialog boxes make it easier for you to develop applications for the Microsoft Windows operating system. A common dialog box is a dialog box that an application displays by calling a single function rather than by creating a dialog box procedure and a resource file containing a dialog box template.
I don’t have a single problem with the word “application”
Goddamn …. That is a thing of horrific beauty. I saved it immediately.
(I’m a technical writer so it should be fun to go through this ancient tome)
to develop applications for the Microsoft Windows operating system.
Could they have meat “uses for the MS…”?
See also the client camera movement guide:
Client cameras love everyone!
Interesting.
The word ‘pan’, came to me from using 3D CAD software and I considered the Jib and Truck actions as ‘pan’ and the original Pan would be camera rotation, which might be ‘turn’ (didn’t use it as much so don’t remember) which was less favourable than using ‘orbit’.
Good to know the word origin.Oh and btw, Dolly would not be zoom, but ‘walk’.
This is ridiculous. There’s no way a client calls a dolly a “pan”.
That’s obviously zooming.
We will zoom out towards the top
I’ll have one zoom sideways to the left, please!
I met a guy who would say “pan forward” and “pan it in an angle”.
A Pan-o-rama
package = app
Source code = app
Function = app
library = app
object code = app
machine code = app
binary = app
linker = app
bits = app
data = app
state = app
stack = app
heap = app
variables = app
memory allocator = app
memory = app
transistors = app
silicon = app
wires = app
pcb = app
electrons = app
leptons = app
