Decoding Coding Jargon

We all had those moments as newbies when fellow devs talked about their code, and we pretended to understand what was being discussed. We didn’t have a single clue, though, because we didn't know how to speak a developer's language.

Programming has its own jargon that you need to get yourself accustomed to if you don’t want to feel left out in techy conversations. Because unless you are someone with a good deal of experience in the tech field, you’ll experience this inadequacy sooner or later. This is why I decided to write this blog to learn the jargon better.

It’s important to express the code we write, as everyone has their own way of writing code. There are loads of ways to explain our code; one way is categorizing it. In this part, I would like to show you some code categorizations to help you better talk fellow dev folks through your code.

Baklava Code

For those who don’t know about it, baklava is a pastry that originated in Ottoman Empire that contains many layers. While the layers of baklava have made it taste delicious, the piling layer on top of the software layer doesn’t come in handy. Code that has layers piled on each other is called baklava code.

Boilerplate Code

In the programming context, a boilerplate is a block of code snippets and assets that programmers choose to reuse rather than creating those from scratch every time.

Hydra Code

Hydra is a water snakelike gigantic monster with 9 heads with an immortal one in the middle. Whoever tries to cut off one head would face two more heads emerging from the fresh wound. Code that cannot be fixed is called hydra code. Every new fix introduces you to two new bugs; therefore, the code snippet should be rewritten to fix the bug.

Jenga Code

I love how we try to remove wooden blocks from the tower without falling while playing Jenga. I can’t say I enjoy writing Jenga Code, though. It’s not the nicest thing to see all the programs collapsing after I touch a single block of code.

Gold Code

There are several phases a software code goes through. Gold code is the ready-to-manufacture form of software.

Cut-and-Waste Code

As programmers, most of us had cut and pasted code that we found on a blog or documentation somewhere along the way. Though it seems like an easy way to progress your project, you may end up wasting tons of time trying to figure out a funky bug in the code that made sense in the blog/documentation you cut and pasted it from. This is called Cut-and-Waste Code.

Spaghetti Code

A system or a program that lacks software structure is called spaghetti code. Spaghetti Code is known for being tangled and twisted. It usually happens when multiple programmers work on a project for a long period of time. Smaller errors add up to the other ones, and the code gets almost impossible to debug and maintain since it’s tangled and twisted.

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Stay tuned for upcoming blogs!