'Don't Google Google, Googling Google is wrong', says Google If you want to write developer documentation like a Google hotshot, you'd better kill “kill”, junk “jank” and unlearn “learnings”. Those are just a few rules from the company's newly open-sourced (oops, two sins there, verbing and hyphenation) developer documentation guide. Even though any Linux user knows “kill” is a command …
"Real programmers" in the Ed Post sense, don't write documentation.
Real developers, in my experience, often write barely comprehensible poorly structured documentation that does little to help anyone who has to maintain their code. It will tell you that the function LogMessage logs a message, but doesn't tell you how the code fits together, how the underlying algorithm works or what the business need was.
Now that we're all Agile, of course, we prefer working code over documentation. Which is fine; just show me some perfectly working code.
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Yes.... google, you have got to that level of fame, stop moaning about grammar, and be proud that almost no-one says 'search the internet' anymore!! If bing had been as good and inclusive, superbly effective etc, we would use that word...
we all say 'sellotape' even though it usually a cheaper brand of adhesive tape!! same thing with Hoover, etc...
I was working for MS via a third party when Bing was just being rolled out and scuttlebutt was that while the engine was being developed and demonstrated internally the engineers kept saying "and then I google <thing>" over and over, until some exec stopped them and said "But it's not Google". No idea how true that is, but I really hope it happened like that.
In particular because at the time they were just literally Googling stuff and reformatting the results...
“Jank” (Wiktionary says “blocking of a software application's user interface due to slow operations or poor interface design”) should be used with care"
Tell that to the Google team that came up with the web based Gmail login page, the Gmail remove accounts (from login page) and the tedious 35 step process to check/'opt-out' of, what are just 5 settings, in terms of setting user privacy regards Google's data slurp.
Google is the king of "Jank".
Contacting someone implies you were successful; "reaching out" and "pinging" can be useful in context, especially if you don't really care about the result: "Yeah, I reached out to (difficult person with a notoriously short attention span) [with a PGP encrypted linguine-long technical proposal] and s/he didn't have any objections"
"i will be doing the necessary".
Someone in India has taught all the call centre staff this. it makes me giggle and go crazy in equal amounts.
Almost certainly standard Indian English, which is yet another variation in our great common tongue. My personal favourite IndEng word is "prepone", meaning "to bring forward in time", by analogy with "postpone".
My personal favourite IndEng word is "prepone", meaning "to bring forward in time", by analogy with "postpone".
Mine is "doubt" to express a misunderstanding. As an academic I am sometimes contacted by Indian students/researchers expressing a "doubt" about some aspect of my published work. The first few times this happened I thought they were being a bit cheeky, until I twigged that they were just seeking clarification.
""i will be doing the necessary".
Someone in India has taught all the call centre staff this. it makes me giggle and go crazy in equal amounts."
Does this sound weird to Anglos ? It's the literal translation of a standard French expression.
"and "pinging" implies you used an ICMP packet."
Not necessarily. The TCP-IP context derives from the use of literal "pings" in ASDIC/SONAR in underwater warfare.Therefore it can have a similar figurative use in any attempt at contact that consists of a short question/answer exchange.
Yes, and both of these really just mean "checked to see if something was there."
In that context, I can go around pinging customers all day, but it won't really tell me anything useful, apart from those people still exist or that they are not responding.
Historically, I would say "pinging" implies you used a sonar, which really shows how conservative we are when it comes to language.
Language is evolving and has, ever since its first use, always been evolving. It is, in my opinion, acceptable, as long as it is augmenting the language (like "tweet" to mean "send a short message on Twitter" and not just the chirping of a bird) while not changing the original meaning (as to a certain extent has happened to "literally", which originally meant "using the original meaning of a phrase" ("The flour literally exploded from the spark") to now meaning "figuratively" or perhaps "virtually" ("She literally exploded with rage").
i think you mean iso date format rather than unix.
if you're going to put the day after the month then the year should go before them both.
while we're on the subject, iso time format should also be preferred. am and pm are anathema in my book.
date-time should always be in gmt, obviously. (i don't refer to it as utc as i'm from greenwich). zulu rules, ok.
But UTC was adopted on the grounds that the UK might decide to implement double summer time, and move the winter time an hour forward, or adopt BST all year round. At that point, GMT would then be different from UTC.
Currently only Morocco uses UTC, as they don't bother with the summer/winter time stuff.
And before you ask, I live in WET, which is currently the same as GMT...
No, GMT would remain GMT whatever the Grubbymint decides watches in Greenwich should be set to. It's a standard, see. Like badgers' feet.
C'mon, standards soviet. We need a standard location for standard time to give a standard offset from Imaginary Time. AND a set of real elReg time units.
That'd end all the confusion for good. Ideas on the back of a perfectly smooth badger please ....
GMT is not the same as UTC, there can be a difference of up to 2 seconds between the two.
GMT is based on the actual position of the sun at noon on the Greenwich meridian. UTC is taken from an atomic clock that can be adjusted up to twice a year on 30th June and 31st December by one second backwards or forwards to bring it closer to GMT.
In these pc days shirly we need more than 2 options?
I mean, this IS the 21st century after all. Just having 2 options is so last century.
am, ateabreak, pteabreak, ap, pp, ash*t, psh*t, aamsh*t, alunch, plunch, aidon'tgiveaflyingfu*km ...
Hmmmm my spellchecker didn't complain about ash*t.
NURSE! I need a commode. Or a new iphone.
>>Thanks. You don't want to know what's in the pocketses
True but at least it is unambiguous. It is ridiculous that it still isn't standardised to use yyyymmdd with or without hyphens or colons. The amount of times I've either been struggling to find a log entry only to realise the date format hasn't been localised or I have to scroll down out of the single digit dates to see what format they are using [fragmentation, consider re-writing]
Similar for times when using a cloudy service.[don't use nouns as adjectives] Are they local to the cloud, are they local are they UTC?[Rhetorical, avoid]
nope, stop thinking like a machine and start demanding to be treated as a human bean... why WE human beans have to learn/bend to a machine-friendly version of the date is what is wrong with society in a nutshell...
the only unambiguous, HUMAN-FRIENDLY date format is wed13sep2017, all the rest is giving up your humanity for the convenience of machines...
It's six potatoes versus half a dozen tomatoes but my computer pops up a short, unambiguous "Wednesday 13 September 2017" which I read as "Wenzday the 13th of September 2000 and 17".
Given that my computer is in France, with local time (French ) correctly displayed and with the date written in English, the decimal point being a full stop not a comma, and monetary symbol being whatever I want - I am very content, and quite amazed at the common sense of the various programmers involved.
Oh yes, I was waiting for this to happen. Someone let the pedants loose (OK, I should have said "lose" to rile them a bit more).
You must be new here. This is El Reg, the pedant Safari Park. Keep your windows closed (or preferably shut down). Stray from the path and they'll devour you in packs.
We prefer our victims in sammiches or sarnies!
Just remember that it's only a sandwich if you slice it diagonally from corner-to-corner into triangles. If sliced straight across edge-to-edge into two rectangles, it's a butty.
And having poured my own tuppence worth of accelerant onto the flames, I shall retreat to a safe distance and watch :)
I can't help thinking they're kind of missing the point: To be so synonymous with something that your name becomes a verb is surely evidence of significant if not total market penetration.
I always chortle every time I catch one of those tortuous scenes in the remake of Hawai'i 5 0 - the ones where they're trying to convince you to "bing" things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3ug8jrja7M
Guess Micro$oft will be ready to hoover up the honours.
But gopher isn't the search engine any more than the WWW is a search engine. In gopher-space, Veronica is the search engine, with a little help from jughead and/or jugtail..
Wide Area Information Search (WAIS) is arguably more useful than gopher+veronica& the jugs, and indeed is often used as a supplement to them. Note that's current tense.
"To be so synonymous with something that your name becomes a verb is surely evidence of significant if not total market penetration."
Such use can be a slippery slope to losing your official trademark recognition. Previous examples are: hoover, aspirin; petrol.
"Such use can be a slippery slope to losing your official trademark recognition. Previous examples are: hoover, aspirin; petrol."
It would only show that if they had the edge at some point, they loose it.
If they continue to be at the top, one will always google with Google.
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"A bit like in the novel Making History where the funny little pictures on your PC screen are call "glyphs""
If they are pictures on an otherwise flat background, like on a Windows desktop, they're icons, but if they are meant to be part of a predefined UI button or other UI element, they're referred to as glyphs.
"Remember also that comments in source code are a sure sign your code is not expressive enough"
Five or 10 minutes spent with this should convince you that is bollocks:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=ecda85e70277ef24e44a1f6bc00243cebd19f985
Yes, I know you are taking the piss, have a UV 8)
I remember one case where it surely did not, it said "abominable hack" and it was!
Don't think that's me, but if the adjective had been, say, "ugly" or "hideous" I could be a candidate. Though I'd probably accompany it with some more suggestion: why it's necessary, how it might be improved when I or anyone have time.
The worst sort of comment is the dreaded "I have no idea how this works". And yes, one or two of my own beautifully coded little darlings bear this mark of shame. I think it happens late at night after many hours of frustration and trying bad ideas because you have run out of good ones. Then you go to bed and forget about it. Some days or weeks later, you look at the code and .... and you have no idea how it works. You know perfectly well that you should re-write it, but after all it does work, and it took hours to write and ... and .... and .... and ...
# I have no idea how this works
The best you can hope for with comments in source code is that they don't contradict the source code...
On the contrary. When they contradict the source code, they offer valuable clues as to how the code has evolved, and useful hooks for searching the change control archives.
Or into the thought processes of the developer, if they are contemporaneous.
The first rule of Robot Club is "You do not talk about Robot Club"
The second rule of Robot Club is "You DO NOT talk about Robot Club"
Oh no sorry, the second rule is "No smoking"
From a series I watched last week:
"The first rule is..."
"Don't talk about fight club, I get it."
"Nah, that would be stupid, how would people know where to go? The first rule is 'Don't bring the Law'"
Don't Google Google
I thought the rest of the quote actually referenced Flanders & Swann: The Reluctant Cannibal
M.
Flanders: Well... I... I never heard a more ridiculous idea in all my born days. To think that a son of mine should grow up to be a sissy - me, chief assistant to the assistant chief! I suppose you realise, son, if this was to get around, we might never get Brexit.
So many people say their browser is 'Google'
I asked someone to open Internet Explorer yesterday. To click on a bookmark.
He got confused of course, and when I went over to help, I found he'd opened Chrome and typed "internet explorer" into the search box...
As he doesn't know what a browser is, I can only conclude that he ended up with Chrome when Google were marketing it like spyware, so you got a "free" download of it when you installed/updated Flash or Adobe's PDF reader.
"A comma before an and, my English teacher is spinning in her grave"
That use of a comma is for disambiguation. It shows that the last two items are to be considered separately - rather than as a compound name.
"The menu had several items of meat, vegetables, fish, and chips."
"The menu had several items of meat, vegetables, fish and chips."
I was using the word 'and' not to create a list or to indicate a join, I was saying the word itself and creating a pause afterwards.
Well if you insist, I'll regale you with a linguistic joke I heard from my grandfather many, many years ago.
Q. Can you construct a valid English sentence that has the word "and" five times in a row?
A. Imagine the scene. A man is painting a pub sign for the "Dog and Duck". A passer-by stops and tells him, "Oi, you've left too much space between 'dog' and 'and' and 'and' and 'duck'..."
My (Oxford trained) english teach was quite clear that you do not put a comma after the penultimate item in a list.
People from the USA seem to often call this delibarate error an Oxford comma but clever people tell me it is better called a "Serial comma".
It is supposed to remove ambiguity but I find that I am distracted from the actual list to consider the error of this extra punctuation mark
Your teacher was wrong. I don't know how it's an "Oxford" comma or controversial at all. It just depends on what you're trying to say. For example:
"I dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God."
So Ayn Rand and God are your parents, and you dedicate the book to them.
"I dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand, and God."
So you dedicate the book to the following:
Your parents
Ayn Rand
God
Both are completely correct grammatically, but they don't mean the same thing. As I mentioned the other day, commas save lives:
"Let's eat, grandma."
"Let's eat grandma."
Again, both of the examples are grammatically correct, but they don't mean the same thing. Taking out a necessary comma doesn't (always) make the sentence grammatically incorrect! It makes it mean something else.
In the UK, to say you 'Bing' anything to describe a search for information (or non-search, which is more the point), it would give a facial response of utter distain and confusion, from those on the receiving end of that conversation.
To say you Bing something is really saying you don't understand the subtleties of what makes you British. There is a real sense of repulsion in using that word as a verb. Googling something on the other hand...everyone understands that.
My brother (state-side), states things like 'Ping me' in his emails. That feels me with distain too and I'm not sure why, it just does.
I doubt anyone looks at you with disdain for saying you'll "bing" something. As most of them won't know what the hell you mean. People in an IT context would laugh at you though.
It's a funny area. I used to say mp3 player, as I had the rather lovely Rio Carbon at the time that loads of people were getting iPods. But should have said iPod, as that was the word most people knew for mp3 player, even if the one they owned also wasn't an iPod.
My Mum does her hoovering with a Dyson.
I guess Googling became the word because "search" can be ambiguous, "search the internet" is too long and Google were top dog at the time many people were first doing this. Anyone remember the rather sad TV adverts "do you Yahoo?" No! Because your homepage looks like it was designed by a blind speed-addict who hates all sighted people.
"My brother (state-side), states things like 'Ping me' in his emails."
That's when you go to google images and search for things such as "untreated" and "grinder accident". You then fill an email with those lovely things and send it off to him.
If your brother asks why you sent such things you say "you asked me to ping you, that's what means, right?"
If your brother explains to you what he considers "ping" to mean then you reply with "oh, I understand now". You then wait for him to ask you to ping him again and send him pictures of eye surgery and motorcycle accidents.
"My brother (state-side), states things like 'Ping me' in his emails. That feels me with distain too and I'm not sure why, it just does."
Because it's stupid?
Ask him his IP address and then ping it, and then give him the results. Do that consistently and he'll learn not to use that idiotic phrase with you. Emailing is not pinging. Pinging is pinging.
(I presume the cited sentence is, uh, the way it is for effect.)
A once noted Calvinball player commented back in the late 1980s-early 1990s that 'verbing weirds language'.
Just because one can do it, doesn't mean that one should.
But then, I find those who use Business English to be comparable with the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. One can only hope that the Revolution comes soon.
Have you DuckDuckGo'd anything recently?
Equally, "I'll give DuckDuck a go for that, thanks", or "I'll give DuckDuckGo a go for that, thanks"?
Does no one every think this through, on how their branded search will be used in a conversation?
'googling Google', is an obvious attempt by Google to protect their Trademark, to prevent it becoming a regular spoken word (which it is).
Have you DuckDuckGo'd anything recently?
I'm fairly certain anyone using that should rightfully expect law enforcement (sans anything better or less effort to add to crimefighting statistics) to pop round to investigate possible cruelty to domesticated fowl.
Or at the very least, drug use...
2024: Organ harvesting drones have been sent to all locations where Google's servers have detected use of the word googling.
2025: No uses of the word googling have been detected this year. It is estimated that the organ banks now hold sufficient stock to keep the remaining few million humans alive for 10,000 years. Matrix OS v1.243
Not recommended: I dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.
Recommended: I dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand, and God
The first sentence states that the dedicator's parents are Ayn Rand & God and that the book is dedicated to them.
The second sentence states that the book is dedicated to all 4 and the assumption is made that the aforementioned parents are not Ayn Rand and God.
Mean what you say and say what you mean.
As for the date format, I applaud Google's compromise. I use the East-Asian format (YYYY-MM-DD) as a matter of course and it does not go down well in Europe. The U.S. format (mm-dd-yyyy) is confusing for non Leftpondians. 'September 13, 2017', however, is perfectly clear. To be sure, people whose first language is not English will be peeved at the use of English as default.
"I use the East-Asian format (YYYY-MM-DD) as a matter of course and it does not go down well in Europe. "
In the 1970s that style was already the established standard in Scandinavian countries. It is the human readable form of the ISO order with separators. I have used that field order in the UK as yyyy/mm/dd for over 40 years.
I have an application that recognises dates in web postings from many countries. It currently runs to about ten major processing variations - some of which have several minor variations. That excludes language conjugation variations for months.
Sweden also uses ISO 8601 format. A beacon of light in the darkness.
Google are wanting people to say 'Search on Google' rather than to google or googling because if to google becomes a verb in common use they can loose the ability to trademark the name as it become generic. This happened to the word hoover in the UK where it was common for people to say they were going to hoover their carpets even if they actually meant vacuum,
Google are wanting people to say 'Search on Google' rather than to google or googling because if to google becomes a verb in common use they can loose the ability to trademark the name as it become generic.
Right, ... let's all Alphabet it then!
(I don't know what that means, but if it costs them a trademark the joke's on them.)
The Google Terms & Conditions used to contain the word "perpetuity" for the extend of time you are giving them rights to any contents you spool through their services. It appears their marketing style guide has been updated since to avoid clear wording - subsequent versions pretty much MEAN the same, but in less clear language to avoid alarming anyone..
How about Search on Google? I weirdly prefer the sound of SoG - and you're not creating an "i" from nowhere, in order to make your acronym work. Like SCSI cheating to be pronounced scuzzy.
So I could say, "please can you sog for a local pizza place.
Or, I was sogging online for porn the other day.
Or a web designer could tell marketing that the site is very easy to find online as it has all the right search engine friendly keywords and such by saying, "our site is very soggy."
Hmmmmm. On second thoughts...
"I don't know what this word means, I'll just SWiG it", or "has someone got a moment to SWiG for the nearest pizza joint?"
Swig is an existing verb:
swig |swɪɡ| informal
verb (swigs, swigging, swigged)
drink in large draughts: Dave swigged the wine in five gulps | [no object] : Ratagan swigged at his beer.
noun
a large draught of drink: he took a swig of tea.
a new form of English that avoids any potential for ambiguity.
e.g. curly braces for a list of items:
I dedicate this book to {my parents, Ayn Rand, and God} .
If your parents were Ayn Rand and God, then something like:
I dedicate this book to my parents {=Ayn Rand, God}
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Instead of trying to force users of a complex, constantly evolving and with a multitude of national, regional and even city based differences, how about we use a new universal language designed from the start to remove such confusion and ambiguity?
I hear Esperanto would suit?
Mines the one with the 'how to speak Spanish' in the pocket.
I hear Esperanto would suit?
With eternal gratitude to Red Dwarf I know exactly one phrase of Esperanto. Admittedly, I'm sure I am mangling it through misrememberance, but I can't be bothered to bing (hehheh, /trollface) it:
"Bonvolo alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano en mia bideo"
Which translates to "Your father was a baboon's Please would you send for the hall porter, there appears to be a frog in my bidet".
If an intransitive verb is one without a direct object, then "The painting was displayed in the Louvre" surely counts as intransitive? Unless you count "to be displayed" as a different verb from "to display", I guess.
I often interact with (specifically Japanese) people learning English and I've come to conclude that the whole transitive/intransitive distinction is quite fluid in English. Japanese is much more clear-cut in most cases thanks to having a direct object marker (を) for transitive verbs, as well as most often having distinct transitive/intransitive verbs (eg, 現す/現る) that form pairs.
As for the Oxford comma, the article did pick a good example of when it's useful. It's not always the case, though. My preference is not to use it in general, but only insert it if it's necessary. In many cases it can be avoided by reordering the terms. As for shift-reduce errors, English grammar isn't LR.
"If an intransitive verb is one without a direct object, then "The painting was displayed in the Louvre" surely counts as intransitive? "
I don't think a linguist would agree. That's just a passive construction and the active equivalent is "Unspecified-subject displayed the painting in the Louvre< which has a direct object.
Hmm. I was unsure about that. Your "passive construction" argument is fairly convincing. As regards fluidity of transitive/intransitive verbs in English, I suppose I'd pick an example like "speak" or "sneeze". Usually they are intransitive, and dictionaries often list them as such, but there doesn't seem to be any problem with "he spoke the truth" or "I just sneezed gobbets of coffee-laced snots on my keyboard" (no icon, since I'm posting as AC). Perhaps intransitive verbs lend themselves more easily to becoming transitive like this...
I can't imagine going through any kind of volume of documentation with that degree of picky wordplay.
developer documentation is generally relatively volatile and will be under near permanent review (and now probably never pass a review) - for consumer (i.e. the great unwashed public) consumption it
may be more reasonable to stick to a house style.
IMHO as long as it is not open to interpretation where its important to the solution - JFDI and stop wasting everyone's time. Developers rarely want anything other than expected results and defined inputs in a manual anyway and therefore don't care even as a consumer about the fancy wordplay...The rest of the words are simply there to make it look big and expensive.
Internet of Things ought to be IT, but presumably the twonk who though the name up didn't want it confused with Information Technology...
As it deals with sensors and the like, just call it the Small Hardware Internet of Things for an obvious acronym.
It makes good sense to have the acronym IoT, precisely because it makes it easier to search for, and it avoids "namespace clash" with the existing well-known use of IT.
IEEE is as it is because presumably there wasn't a well-known already existing use of IEEE for it to be easily confused with? (In general, I agree that "the"s, "of"s, etc, in names shouldn't be part of the acronym, however.)
... we're wandering the Plains of Pedantry (and at the welcome risk of being burned in olive oil with a touch of garlic and rosemary), the devil is ever in the detail:
"...and we learn that Google follows the usage of all civilised persons: it instructs devs not to capitalise the first word after the colon."
Hmmm. So they would require a lower case version of the word I (referring to the personal pronoun, and yes - I is a word in this context)? Or a lower case R for Richard if Richard were the first of a list of names? I sincerely hope not, and hope further that no 'civilised person', never mind 'all' of them would either.
And now, just for fun, we can perhaps proceed to the question of whether it is grammatically correct to begin a sentence with a conjunction. And before the flames begin, just let me go grab my Fowler, Chicago and Garner so I can quote page numbers :-).
"And now, just for fun, we can perhaps proceed to the question of whether it is grammatically correct to begin a sentence with a conjunction. And before the flames begin, just let me go grab my Fowler, Chicago and Garner so I can quote page numbers :-)."
Shalln't we not all burn them in Hell, as the joy would be great only if.
The "outside universe" would prefer Google to seal up their parallel universe bubble a bit better. The Google universe is a strange place where everything is free, nothing may be private, smiling people think they're changing the world by moving protobufs, and normal code will not compile.
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For those Greg Champion officionados...
You don't call Walla Walla Walla,
And you don't call Gin Gin Gin,
You don't call Mooney Mooney Mooney,
And you don't call Kin Kin Kin.
You never call Pindi Pindi Pindi,
And you don't call Grong Grong Grong,
And you don't call Wagga Wagga Wagga, no sir,
Calling Wagga Wagga Wagga is wrong.
"The guide carries plenty of evidence of a long debate about what words can be both noun and verb: “login” is a noun, with “sign in” given as the preferred"
That's because the real verb would be "log in". "login" is just a convenient verbified term, but confusing to non geeks.
So they don't like hyphens? I think they should be used more in the English language to avoid confusion, and reflect better the nuances of the actual spoken language. In many languages words are just concatenated without the hyphen.
"We are where we are" was once said to us by a developer who had created something that only worked with Postscript printer drivers. We pointed out that we had hundreds of printers that were PCL5 only.
Management should have fired him. They didn't so. instead of a few more hours development time, we spent a huge amount on new printers. Many years later (8?), we still have to require all new printers support it.
Google translate says the Latin is
Nos sumus in quo sumus.
That sounds like something for a family motto or coat of arms
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