Reasons to hit programmers

Posted on 03/02/2006 by Meryl Yourish

Conversation in my office this morning:

“What’s ‘nillable’?”
“It means the variable can be null.”
“Then why doesn’t it say ‘nullable’?”
“Because a programmer wrote it.”

I’d forgotten that programmers are on my “Die for what you’ve done to the English language” list, right up there with business-speak creators. (“Bulletize”? “Bulletize”? Stop verbing my nouns!)

Yeah, I know. It’s a living language. But it’s ridiculous to use “nillable” to define a variable that can be null when, gee, I dunno, “nullable” would be so much plainer. More intuitive. “Nil” and “null” have two very different meanings.

/language rant.

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8 Responses to Reasons to hit programmers

  1. David Gerstman says:
    03/02/2006 at 11:56 am

    Uh, Meryl, sorry for being a geeky stickler, but shouldn’t you have opened your rant with a tag? Unmatched tags really bug the programmer in me.
    :-)

  2. Alan Furman says:
    03/02/2006 at 4:34 pm

    Decades ago, the programming language LISP was held in exceptional reverence among geeks. It denotes anything that is null, empty, uninitialized, or logically false “nil”. Severely affected programmers would say “T” and “nil” to each other in place of “yes” and “no.”

    So there is your explanation: tribal culture.

  3. Bob says:
    03/02/2006 at 6:01 pm

    Meryl –

    I agree with the “tribal culture” comment. For those of us who’ve worked in IT for many years, it’s very easy to slip into “tech-ese” when describing something to the average layman.

    Case in point. Was instructing my Dad on usage of his first-ever PC and during the course of describing how Windows works, the phrase “default settings” came up.

    Classic “deer-in-the-headlights” look followed by “What does not paying a bank note have to do with the settings on my computer?” Once I stopped laughing at myself, it was easy…but lordy, the trouble words can get you into!!

    Bob

  4. cond0010 says:
    03/03/2006 at 2:15 am

    Here’s something from way out in left field, Meryl –

    Nullable rhymes with gullible. Ya think that programmers may have altered it slightly to avoid the ‘L-user’ phenomenon?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luser

    gee – I hope I’m not starting a meme here… :)

  5. Veeshir says:
    03/03/2006 at 9:28 am

    Stop verbing my nouns!

    I would just like to point out how much I love that sentence. That’s just funny.

  6. Meryl Yourish says:
    03/03/2006 at 5:55 pm

    I’d love to be able to take credit for it, Veeshir, but I learned that phrase from Terry McGarry, back when we were both in the Waverly Writer’s Workshop.

    Now she’s on bookshelf stores everywhere.

  7. Michael Lonie says:
    03/04/2006 at 1:02 am

    Really, what else can you expect from people who, if asked to count up to ten, start counting with zero?

  8. Venture says:
    03/04/2006 at 9:56 am

    All verbs can be nouned. All nouns can be verbed.

    Resistance is useless!

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