2) Slacker Jobs Have Vanished.<\/strong> This Is a Bad Thing.<\/strong> A tangential backstory to the foregoing. Artistic and technological progress both depend upon an ample supply of easy-to-get “day jobs” for our creative risk-takers. (They are not really “slacker” jobs, but I call them that here because that is how they are often regarded, inasmuch as they are not career-oriented.) Golden Age was 1980-2000. Steady decline since then. Bad for business, bad for society, bad for culture.<\/p>\n [ADDENDA 18 mar 2014:]<\/p>\n 3) Dev-Tech Jargon is wrongheaded, misleading, obscure. Why?<\/strong> Particularly noticeable in web development.<\/p>\n Big example: The pieces of a webpage are collectively called the DOM. But what does DOM mean? Document Object Model<\/em>? That\u00a0is as clear as mud, and\u00a0probably less useful. There’s a Document<\/em> here, certainly; but there’s no Object<\/em>, not in the programming sense. (Object is another near-meaningless term\u2014see below.) And Model<\/em>? It’s not a Model; it’s the final result, the end-product, the actual real-life thing that shows up on your screen. Alternative phrases for DOM are Presentation Layer <\/em>and\u00a0Page Markup <\/em>and\u00a0Source Code with related assets. <\/em>These all have slightly different meanings, but they aim in the same approximate direction as DOM, and they are user-friendly besides.<\/p>\n Then you have API, supposedly for Application Programming Interface<\/em>. Ask ten developers what an API is, they’ll give you fourteen different answers. So far as I can tell, an API is a set of shorthand instructions that the site programmers create and make available to the general public, in order to enable outside developers to come up with add-ons and customized implementations. Isn’t there something else we could call this? How’s about Toolbox<\/em>?<\/p>\n Closure<\/em>. Does anyone know what a closure in Javascript is? Lots of people think they do. They don’t.<\/p>\n I can’t tell you why Dev-Tech jargon is so awful, but I sense these problems go back a long way. Back at least to the early days of OOP, or object-oriented programming. Before my time. Maybe it all began with OOP. Do you know what object-oriented programming means? It just means modular programming. You try to design each section of your code as a separate, reusable building-block. So why didn’t they call it building-block programming, or prefab programming, or modular programming? Because then it would be too easy to understand?<\/p>\n Yes, I think that could very well be part of it.<\/p>\n![\"peas\"](\"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/peas-236x300.png\")
Then you’ve got the ever-popular\u00a0var<\/em>. What is<\/strong> a var?<\/em> The term \u00a0is apparently short for variable. However, a var is\u00a0not<\/em> a variable. “It’s sort of like a container,” an instructor once told me. I thought of a can of peas, only without the peas, and with the label removed. This didn’t help me a bit. Because a var is not<\/em>\u00a0a container, and it’s not like<\/em> a container; it’s more like the thing in a container\u2014a pea, say. A single pea that you name Fred<\/em>, or myPea<\/em>. It’s a single identifiable instance of something, and it’s identifiable because you give it a name. And why do you give it a name to make it identifiable? So you can write code to tell it what to do. Here, Fred, roll across my screen\u2014back and forth, back and forth\u2014and double in size every five seconds! Attaboy, Fred!<\/em><\/p>\n
![\"margotdarby.png\"](\"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/margotdarby.png\")
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