And what’s really annoying about it is that the things that make it annoying are in fact far too tedious to even talk about, so I can’t even bitch about it without sending people to sleep. At least if you’re bothered by other humans/television/the weather you can complain in an engaging fashion.
Turning words into jargon:
MS Visual Studio .NET has replaced the term Workspace [used in previous versions] with Solution . I guess it is meant to inspire optimism and such.
A good rule of thumb is that just about any software related thing that calls itself a ‘technology’ is probably going to greatly annoy me at some point. Everything software is really just a methodology, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something. [Update: I am probably being a hypocrite here because it is almost certain that somewhere on this very site I have described some of my own systems as 'technologies' eg my font rendering technology ]
An interesting opinion on the never ending march of new software ‘technologies’ is had by Joel of Joel on Software. In his article The Law of Leaky Abstractions he talks about how no attempt to simplify a fundamentally complex system can ever be 100% successful… ie some of the underlying complexity will always "leak" through. So basically everytime you build a shiny new [object oriented] system on top of a dusty old one, you don’t actually make it easier, because every now and then some wierd behaviour will cause problems at the high level which can not be understood without investigating things at the lower level.
Thinking of tech blog things, here’s a great one I’ve been reading recently, documenting some of the history/esoterica of the Windows API.