Violent allusions in software development

Posted under Blog Posts, Software Design

A friend/customer of mine pointed out that I use some odd words in one of my e-mails.  I had sent him an e-mail about some firmware updates for his devices, and I said that one of the updates was ‘an attractive candidate’ for a problem that he was having. I was really thinking in terms of “an attractive target patch to kill a bug,” but he got an amorous vibe from the phrase and asked if my wife ever got jealous of my attraction to firmware updates.

That got me thinking about the phrase “target patch to kill a bug.”  Our terminology is quite violent.

“Destroy the thread after you kill it.”

This is not a new observation, but it still strikes me funny; we use many programming terms related to conflict and violence:

• killing threads
• terminating processes
• targeting assemblies
• destroying objects
• coercing types
• tearing down applications
• fatal crashes
• and of course ?the blue screen of death” (BSOD)

It must stem from some combination of:

• the frustrating and sometimes-adversarial nature our technology, 
• our tendency as humans to anthropomorphize our non-living adversaries, 
• and our desire to make mundane things more exciting.

If you have any other theories, I would love to hear them!

“He can compute 1,000,000 values a second”

On a related note about anthropomorphizing our software, one of the original founders of my company used to talk about his software by using gender-specific pronouns.  In the interest of avoiding the excessive use of pronouns in the following sentences while still protecting the identities of the innocent, I’ll call the founder “Bob.” 

Bob would say things like “He gets data out of the file, and then he writes it into a flat file.”  I asked Bob about it, and Bob said that he used “he” to talk about the behavior of the program itself, and was never referring to the programmer who wrote it.  Most often, Bob was referring to software that Bob himself had written.  It was a bit like the way that sailors and ship builders refer to their ships as “she.”  It took a long time for me to get used to Bob using those pronouns, and I never adopted that style; I still use the pronoun “it” to refer to programs.�