The most awesome Stack Overflow question ever posted was deemed unsuitable for the site, so it was not just closed; it was deleted. It does not exist anymore. (See Jeff Atwood: Building Social Software for the Antisocial.) The title of the question was: “New programming jargon you coined?” and as you might imagine, it received hundreds of answers. Most of the answers would make you laugh; some would make you laugh hard; some would have you in stitches.

Jeff Atwood saved the top 30 or so of those answers in his blog: Coding Horror - New Programming Jargon (though these are not even the funniest ones,) and it seems like the rest of the answers are lost forever.

Or are they?

Well, actually, thanks to archive.org, humanity will continue to have access to this treasure of mirth for all eternity.

Here is the link: archive.org - stackoverflow.com - New programming jargon you coined?

Tip: First read the question, then go to the last answer and start reading the answers back-to-front after skipping those with scores of -1, 0, and 1. Make sure you have an hour to spare.

Here is some programming jargon which I have either coined, or picked up and doing my best to increase its popularity:

Magical Incantation

Any code statement, function argument, command line, formulation, or construct that is necessary to get something to work as intended, which one could have never guessed, and for which absolutely no hint was provided. Also, any such construct which, after being put to use, one could never infer what it accomplishes by just looking at it. Of course, in theory, everything is understandable if you read the book, but a) #AintNoBodyGotNoTimeFoDat, and b) are you seriously expecting programmers to memorize entire books of jargon?

PEARL

A keyword that I add to source code comments that explain weird, unexpected, usually lame, sometimes incredibly lame behavior of other people’s software that my software has to account for and work around.

Get run over by a crocodile

Refers to the possibility that the programmer who has written all of the software that a company depends on might one day quit working for that company or be otherwise incapable of continuing with their duties. Combination of “get run over by a bus” and “get eaten by a crocodile”, similar to “rocket surgery”.

Search and destroy

Refers to a botched “search and replace” operation that seriously fouled up the entire source code base.

WTFPM

What-The-Fucks-Per-Minute – a measure of how smoothly (or not) code review is progressing.

Blasphemy

Any choice which, although technically valid, nonetheless feels wrong, like a buffer size which is not a power of two, a raster image there where a vector image would do equally well, etc.

Hail-Mary Initialization

The cargo-cult programming practice of pre-initializing a local variable with some meaningless value which is then overwritten with some other value in all execution paths. See Hail-Mary Initialization.