Buzzwords and Pitchforks
A large portion of my life has been dedicated to the study of language. I studied and worked professionally with Arabic for a number of years, and have picked up little bits and pieces of various other languages as I’ve played around with them. I’m learning Hindi now, though more slowly than I’d like (anyone giving away free Hindi lessons near Boulder, CO?), and I’ll probably continue to tinker with languages until my dying day.
One of the funnier things about language is the way it changes over time– and in different circumstances. English is a good example of this; it’s changed so much in the past thousand or so years, and is such an amalgam of other languages, that it barely resembles the language it once was.
The changes can come pretty fast, too– especially in the IT industry. Our vocabulary is a constantly shifting landscape, brought on by various technologies coming to the forefront and slowly fading away– a landscape punctuated by buzzwords and the IT community’s reaction to them.
Buzzwords, we think, are like marketing slogans. Those of us that consider ourselves really hardcore developers think of them as some type of business scourge– the worst kind of proprietary technology marketing, little word- sized billboards advertising techniques and materials of no value whatsoever, attached to projects at a whim to garner attention.
Buzzwords are so hated, in fact, we have Anti-Buzzword Buzzwords. Mocking phrases like “Buzzword Compliant” to describe a group or project, a label of irrelevancy. We sneer, or pointedly ignore, anything tainted with buzzwords, considering them beneath our dignity.
The Rails community has been under attack since its inception for buzzword compliance, especially since Prototype (and RJS) cause the dreaded “AJAX” word to be uttered pretty regularly by what we’re now calling Railers.
Here’s the thing. I think sometimes a buzzword is just a common word for something– a word that everyone immediately understands when it is said. It’s counter-productive to describe something by anything other than the most common, understandable term– and for that reason I support using “AJAX,” to describe that particular set of technologies that XmlHTTPRequest is a part of.
But watch out next time you mention “AJAX” on the streets; there are literally droves of XmlHTTPRequest language purists out there with torches, pitchforks, and stacks of prosaic blog entries– they could very well drive you crazy with their incessant whining.
