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Getting your own back on technical seminar speakers

By Verity Stob • Get more from this author

Posted in Verity Stob, 14th May 2012 09:19 GMT

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Pattern: Fizz-Buzz

Motivation: Speaker needs to add credibility to whatever programming technique he is pushing

Intent: The key has a strong awareness of which words and phrases are currently fashionable.

Implementation: This brief extract from a recent talk demonstrates the point:

Talk giver, hitting a climax: ...so you see, you can use this approach to inject a functional approach into an existing framework.

Delegate, raising arm: Isn't that very object-oriented?

Talk giver, hastily: Oh, no. It's not object-oriented. It's not object-oriented at all. It's very fluent and lightweight.

Delegate subsides, satisfied and impressed.

Examples: Long ago, the writer heard Bjarne Stroustrup himself complain that "object-oriented" had become a marketing synonym for "good". Many clichés have coursed through the culvert since then, and now it has become a coded term for "old-fashioned" - which is pretty much the same as "bad", to one decimal place.

It is not enough, then, for a speaker to speak in buzzing-words and fizzing-phrases. The key is to be aware of how much of their credibility remains to be spent, and to avoid worn-out terms loaded with non-technical debt.

Here is a small kut-out-'n'-keep table of examples, current as of writing, to get you started:

*Buzziness of Buzzwords, May 2012*
Jargon	Credibility (1.0 best, -1.0 worst)
agile	-0.17
design by contract	-0.82
data-driven	-0.76
fluent	0.97
functional	0.95
injection	0.65
inside-out/outside-in	0.32
lightweight	0.57
native	0.81
object-oriented	-0.84
pattern	-0.13
performant	-0.21
pushback	0.77
seam	0.93
technical debt	0.16
test-driven	0.12
top-down/bottom-up	-0.72
unit test (as noun)	0.36
unit test (as verb)	0.43
virtual	-0.53