programming terms
255 glossary entries tagged programming, listed alphabetically.
- "is it worth the time?"
- 42 (the Answer)
- abstraction
- ACIDAtomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability
- Ada Lovelace
- AgileAgile software development (the 2001 Manifesto and its family)
- Alan Turing
- Aleph One and Smashing the Stack
- all models are wrong
- Amdahl's law
- analog vs digital
- Android (as a Linux descendant)
- APIApplication Programming Interface
- archive formats (zip, tar, gz, 7z, rar, iso, cab)
- Ariane 5 Flight 501
- ASIC
- ASLRaddress space layout randomization
- Atwood's law
- Barbara Liskov
- Base64
- baz
- big ball of mud
- bikesheddingParkinson's Law of Triviality
- bisection
- bitbinary digit
- bit banging
- bit bucket
- bit rot
- BitKeeper (and the birth of Git)
- Blockchain
- blue screen of death
- bohrbug
- Brooks's law
- BSDBerkeley Software Distribution
- buffer overflow
- bug (the first computer bug)
- bus factor
- byte
- C
- cargo cult programming
- CDATAcharacter data (XML)
- checksum
- Chesterton's fence
- choose boring technology
- circuit breaker
- Claude Shannon
- CLICommand-Line Interface
- client-server
- Clippy
- code smell
- compiler
- consensus
- container
- Conway's law
- cowboy coding
- CRUDCreate, Read, Update, Delete
- cruft
- daemon
- debugging
- Deep Blue
- DEFLATE, gzip and zlib
- Dennis Ritchie
- dependency hell
- dogfooding
- Douglas Engelbart
- DRYDon't Repeat Yourself
- ECMAEuropean Computer Manufacturers Association
- ELIZA
- Emacs
- encoding
- endianness (On Holy Wars)
- FLOSSFree/Libre and Open Source Software
- foo / bar
- footgun
- FPGA
- free as in beer
- frobnicate
- FUBARFouled Up Beyond All Recognition
- fuzzing
- Gall's law
- GDBGNU Debugger
- generative AI
- George Boole
- GIGOgarbage in, garbage out
- Go To Statement Considered Harmful
- gold-plating
- googol
- Gordon Moore
- GPL (GNU General Public License)
- Grace Hopper
- GraphQL
- Greenspun's tenth rule
- grok
- hack
- halt and catch fire (HCF)
- hash function
- heisenbug
- hello, world
- Hofstadter's law
- hotfix
- Hyperlink
- Hyrum's law
- idempotence
- idempotent
- if it hurts, do it more often
- integer overflow
- John von Neumann
- KanbanKanban (Toyota's pull system, adapted to knowledge work)
- Ken Thompson
- kernel
- Kernighan's law
- KISSKeep It Simple, Stupid
- kludge
- large language model (LLM)
- LatinowareLatinoware - the Latin American free software congress at Itaipu
- LCSlongest common subsequence
- leaky abstraction
- left-pad
- Leslie Lamport
- LGTMlooks good to me
- Libera.Chat and the freenode exodus
- Linus Torvalds
- Linus's law
- Linux distribution (distro)
- Log4Shell
- magic number
- make it work, make it right, make it fast
- mandelbug
- Margaret Hamilton
- MCPModel Context Protocol
- Meltdown
- memory leak
- memory safety
- Merkle tree
- Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf)
- Microcode
- microservice
- Midori (Microsoft's post-Windows research OS)
- Moore's law
- mungMung Until No Good
- nano
- nerd snipe
- no silver bullet
- not invented hereNot Invented Here
- null pointer dereference
- NX bit / DEPno-execute bit / data execution prevention
- off-by-one error
- OGNL (Object-Graph Navigation Language)
- Package manager
- patch
- Paxos
- peer-to-peer
- perfect is the enemy of good
- POSIXPortable Operating System Interface
- Postel's law
- premature optimization
- PTP (Precision Time Protocol)
- QAquality assurance
- rabbit hole
- race condition
- Raft
- Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal
- ReDoSRegular expression Denial of Service
- Reflections on Trusting Trust
- regexregular expression
- regression
- regression testing
- RESTRepresentational State Transfer
- Richard Stallman (rms)
- RNGrandom number generator
- Rodrigo Montoro (Sp0oKeR)
- Rodrigo Rubira Branco (BSDaemon)
- Rowhammer
- RPMRPM Package Manager
- rubber duck debugging
- SBOM
- schroedinbug
- semantic versioning
- serverless
- sharding
- shell
- Shellshock
- shift-left
- SIInternational System of Units
- single source of truth
- Snow Crash (Stephenson, 1992)
- SNTP (Simple Network Time Protocol)
- SOAPSimple Object Access Protocol
- socket
- Solar Designer (Alexander Peslyak)
- SOLIDsingle responsibility, open-closed, Liskov substitution, interface segregation, dependency inversion
- spaghetti code
- Spectre
- Spring4Shell
- SQLStructured Query Language
- stack canary
- stack overflow
- TAIInternational Atomic Time
- technical debt
- test automation
- testing in production
- the 640K quote
- the CAP theorem
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar
- the ENIAC programmers
- the fallacies of distributed computing
- the GNU Manifesto
- the golden hammer
- the happy path
- the IOCCCInternational Obfuscated C Code Contest
- the Jargon File
- the Knight Capital glitch
- the Konami Code
- the lawsuit that created ZIP
- the leap second
- the Linux kernel
- the Mars Climate Orbiter
- the ninety-ninety rule
- the Pentium FDIV bug
- the principle of least astonishment
- the second-system effect
- the Story of Mel
- the Turing test
- the Two Generals problem
- the two hard things
- the WinRAR licence
- the XY problem
- the Year 2038 problem
- the zero-one-infinity rule
- Therac-25
- there are no solutions, only trade-offs
- thundering herd
- tracing
- transaction
- transformer
- turtles all the way down
- ULIDUniversally Unique Lexicographically Sortable Identifier
- Unix
- use-after-free
- UTCCoordinated Universal Time
- vi / Vim
- VLC (VideoLAN Client)
- WebAuthn (and FIDO2, CTAP)
- webhook
- Wheeler's aphorism
- Wirth's law
- wizard
- works on my machine
- worse is better
- Xerox PARC
- Y2Kthe Year 2000 problem
- YAGNIYou Aren't Gonna Need It
- yak shaving
- YAMLYAML Ain't Markup Language
- Zawinski's law