The Dirty Words of Software Development

A post today by Jeremy Miller has a (late) Tribute to George Carlin which lists words and phrases that should not be used when discussing software development. I don't think the list was meant to be comprehensive but it's a good read anyway.  One of them does a good job of backing up my contention that analogies are evil:

“Software as Construction” – ... I feel perfectly qualified to say that the “Software as Construction” analogy is an extremely poor fit.

It's good to see that Mort is also on the list, and the first one too! That one really struck a nerve for me when I first heard it last year, so it should be at the top.

I'm not so sure about the "refactoring" items.  Bad design and refactoring are two different things. Code duplication is bad design and should never be tolerated. But adding unneeded (and worse, untested) complexity for the sake of generality alone isn't a smart use of resources either. I think the term "refactoring" has essentially become synonymous with "rewriting" anyway -- nobody's fooled by that jargon any more.

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