by wrs 12 hours ago
It's such an odd little subcultural quirk that Fortran (really HPC) people call programs and libraries "codes". Most software folks refer to "code", as if it was a substance like sand or water, and use other words for specific units of "code" (programs, libraries, modules).
If you want to peer into an alternative reality / funhouse mirror of programming terms, you should look at ALGOL 68. For instance, types are called "modes".
https://jemarch.net/a68-jargon/
(There are also "incestuous unions", which is the actual term used in the spec.)
Huh - R has a concept of “mode” that overlaps and complements “type”… but then again R also a very funhouse mix of terminology.
https://rstudio.github.io/r-manuals/r-lang/Objects.html#inde...
From the docs, an incestuous union is the equivalent of a packed union in C? Well, you gotta be packing' to be incestuous :D
Author of the blog post. It's just being a non-native speaker and writing the blog post by hand shows these little mistakes. I've been using the terms "code" and "codes", but you might very well be right that my usage is not entirely correct. I'll ask native speakers what the proper usage is here.
It's very common among scientific programmers to call programs "codes," native speaker or not. It's just a quirk of different computing communities evolving differently.
I do come from the scientific community, so didn't know until today that not every community uses the term "codes".
I guess when you’ve been calling it that before everyone else you’re allowed. Sort of how Common Lisp calls threads ‘processes’.
As does Smalltalk and Erlang, and to make things more interesting, all three mean something not exactly the same.
> Sort of how Common Lisp calls threads ‘processes’.
Can you point to any documentation on that? It's not in the hyperspec and it doesn't seem to be in Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition (using the index)
>Fortran (really HPC) people call programs and libraries "codes".
I think it's a European engineering thing that just sort of caught on, actually. For example when I was in undergrad, my 4th-year computational fluids prof made us use "Code Aster"[0] and "Code Saturne"[1] which are both made by a French lab, I believe. Most of the usage of "code as a countable noun" that I've encountered has origins in English-as-a-second-language projects.
The uncountable aspect of many English words is highly unintuitive to many of us.
Information. Code. Software. Hardware.
I suspect many people don't even know they are uncountable.
I suppose for software we should just use programs or applications. But that's slightly more specific than software!
In French we can have both: le logiciel as some uncountable mass, or un/des/N logiciels if you need to count them.
Why the hell do I need to cut information into pieces to count it?
Both English and French are cursed languages, but English loses on this one.
And then there's the trousers. And now you need to say "a pair of" to talk about one unit of them. Though to be completely fair we have that for the glasses (lunettes) and the scissors as well.
> I suspect many people don't even know they are uncountable.
Well, most English speakers may not know the term, but they can feel the concept just fine.
> In French we can have both: le logiciel as some uncountable mass, or un/des/N logiciels if you need to count them.
This mostly works in English (and other European languages) as well, e.g. "Two teas/beers, please" etc. But in English this turn of phrase is much more restricted which is indeed a shame.
And let's not even start with pluralia tantum.
> Well, most English speakers may not know the term, but they can feel the concept just fine.
Oh yeah, I should have specified, I was speaking about non native speakers, and thinking about people speaking French or a similar language.
>In French we can have both: le logiciel as some uncountable mass, or un/des/N logiciels if you need to count them.
Mais est-ce qu'on dit "les codes"? Selon moi ça ne marche pas.
Now that you say it, when speaking about software code, it might not be very common to use the plural form in French too, it's indeed more like water, some uncountable mass. I don't think I would be shocked though.
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in the ngspice user manual, they call circuit descriptions an "input deck"