Every now and again in my job, a new acronym or buzzword or phrase appears out of nowhere and makes itself at home. I mean today, everyone's using it, and yesterday I'm certain that they weren't.
For Vectron!
No, not that. Today it's 'code smells'. What's a code smell all of a sudden? I've literally never heard anyone talk about code smells until today, and now we're all talking about code smells as though they've been around forever! Code smells. It's the most non-software term - code can't smell; it's just characters on a screen: a language used by computers to turn billions of calculations into useful actions and windows and emails! No olefactory detection, just logic.
It turns out that 'code smells' are little hints in the source code that something isn't quite right. Computers being computers, there are lots of software tools out there that are trained to look for the telltale signs of underlying problems. How they sniff out that whiffy old code, I've no idea, but apparently they do.
Perhaps there are grammar smells. Or punctuation smells! Use of multiple exclamation marks could indicate someone with anger problems? Repeating ellipses for the person who can't finish a sentence, and repeated adverbs for the technical writer who clearly can't stop using them despite repeatedly reminding himself, in his personal blog...
Well anyway, the developers are going on about code smells today and I'm wondering what other jargon will make it into our vocabulary by the end of the week, and how much pretending everyone will do that they all know exactly what they're talking about.
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