Some of my Favorite Tech Words

May sound weird, but I've always enjoyed collecting words that sound a bit funny but have real meaning. And I love tossing them into talk or paper. These are some of my favorite ones related to tech and programming.

The classic for beginning programmers is Concatenate, many never having heard the word before going into programming. But others are much more fun.

Canonicalization: Conversion of data that has more than one possible representation into a standard form, know as the canonical form.

Sargability: Comes from "Search ARGument ABLE" meaning the quality of a SQL query which allows the database engined to use indexes. The easiest way to understand this is to see what makes a query un-Sargable such as saying "Upper(ColName) = 'value'" or "ColName Like '%value'".

Orthogonality: Designing such that a small set of component can be combine to get results. It speaks of simplicity, and few exceptions. Orthogonal components are designed with few exceptions. They are symmetrical, consistent, and simple.

Idempotence: In mathematics and computer science mean an operation that can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application. In programming means a function or service that when called with the same parameters always returns with the same values.

Memoization: To optimize by storing the results of expensive calculations to be able to return the cached results when called with the same parameters.

Enjoy!

--Al-