Opinion on emotive namings.

carveone

I've been wondering about companies and individual policy on this for a while now - thought I'd throw it to the boardsies.

The use of the words child/parent/sibling with regard to tree structures and processes is something I like to avoid if at all possible. Problem is I can't think of really good words to describe the equivalent thing. Descendant is one I suppose or Successor. Anyone have any better ideas?

There is a good reason for my care - once upon a time, a good few years ago, I saw a demo go badly wrong because someone was careless with their output. When a subprocess was terminated, he'd printfed 'child killed by parent". As it happened the rep viewing the demo had lost his kid in a car accident. A million pound contract went up in smoke ....

ronivek

Probably better off without a customer who decides they don't want your software because you used widely accepted naming conventions for a tree structure. I really don't see the issue here at all; although I'm somewhat confused as to why you would be printing information like that during a demo in the first place.

uasal2000

Think I have to agree with ronivek here, but if you must supernode and subnode or just plain super sub, could get confusing though given these terms are already used by oo inheritence

phil

Sounds like you're focussing on a very opaque problem because someone hit the lottery once. Parent and child are very well defined naming conventions and as sorry as I would be that someone would lose their child in a car accident, it sounds rather juvenile of that particular individual.

Do you stop using the term daemon because you come across a catholic? What about the word Java in case you come across a recovering caffeine addict? Or the term C because some guy didn't get into medicine because of that damn result in honours Irish.

Then again, political correctness wouldn't be my thing...

Language can be ambiguous. Words can mean more than one thing. Computer & programming terminology normally borrows from the real world where it suits much like medicine, engineering and most othe faculties. That's life... there are definitely more important things to be worrying about with your code.

toiletduck

I'm with phil on this one.

carveone wrote: »

The use of the words child/parent/sibling with regard to tree structures

You can't say that, I once fell out of a tree! Brings up bad memories :pac:

Killgore Trout

Reminds me of people getting offended with master/slave:

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/master.asp

kayos

Whats the world coming too! Honestly that contract going out the door was prob a good thing. Can you imagine what a picking client he would have been?

Although I remember in my first job there was an animation or two a client took offence to. It was a animation for when a kiosk was connecting to a call center. There was two of them, a light bulb that ran across the screen and screwed itself into the socket or a plug doing the same. Apparently it was to sexual....

Then again the same place had a project internally named as gspot....

carveone

phil wrote: »

Sounds like you're focussing on a very opaque problem because someone hit the lottery once.

Just wondering really The point I was making was that it sometimes pays to be aware that internal terminology shouldn't always make it to the customers eyes. Besides, messages should be available to be localised.

Parent and child are very well defined naming conventions

Indeed they are, I wouldn't argue with that. In previous times, however, programmers were inclined to be arrogant. I know darn well even the experienced people on this board have seen messages that are completely bewildering. However, if you do that on a website, you're hosed - people will make zero effort to accomodate you.

The software market is a multi billion pound one - frankly I could do with a percentage

kayos

Best message I ever saw in an app was simply

"It don't work!"

Classic tbh

Red Alert

I'm sorry for the guy involved, but it was more his immaturity not to award the contract to the best product. IMHO if it was my company, anyone who feels emotionally unable to conduct business in a normal way should take a break and come back when ready. It would be different if someone directly attacked the guy involved, which of course nobody should have, but come on - a debug print line?? I'm not going to change my nomenclature used internally in programs to avoid the 1% chance of upsetting someone I'm afraid.

Apparently some state in the US went overboard about references to Master/Slave in cluster configurations because they were afraid it might offend african-americans working there.

phil

carveone wrote: »

Just wondering really The point I was making was that it sometimes pays to be aware that internal terminology shouldn't always make it to the customers eyes.

In a perfect world, all error messages that a user potentially sees would be all perfect, but for the most part, errors are unexpected events and there's a tradeoff between making the error useful for a technician / developer to debug and something that the user can decipher and make a decision with.

carveone wrote: »

The software market is a multi billion pound one - frankly I could do with a percentage

I'd suggest you're focussing on completely the wrong thing.

FDuff

phil wrote: »

In a perfect world, all error messages ...

what error ??

that kind of syntax is as previously said, is well established within the s/w community, but then again, that kind of print out is suitable only for debug purposes. During a demo to a customer, you would display error msgs in a more user-friendly manner.