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Programmers Language 101

Have you ever happened to have a talk with a person which is specialist in one topic, and in a certain point you realize you don’t understand half of the conversation? I have, and a lot of times. Doctors will talk about free radicals, lawyers about alibis, construction engineers about material resistance, advanced math teachers about Laplace transforms, and so on.

As programmers we are not the exception. We use to be so deep into our own world that sometimes forgot that we are speaking our own language with people that doesn’t fully understand it. As Will Rogers said

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects

I’m really an ignorant on a lot of topics: when I speak to my accountant, I’d really like to have a guide that put what do accumulated depreciation or bank reconciliation really mean in plain human words.

So thinking about that I thought that it might be useful to write some posts about some of the terms that we commonly use as the programmers argot described in plain English. If you are already into the programming world, you may want to better jump to my Programming section, which covers some more advanced topics.

If you are a non-technical person that use to frequently speak with programmers, I hope you might find here some of the answers to the questions that might have arisen in any of those talks. I’ll base the content of the posts on my previous experience both as an instructor and a programmer, trying to give you a better understanding about the topic.

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