Can you identify novice programmers by how they say 'object orientated'?

http://www.thejanuarist.com/shibboleths-as-spoken-cultural-passwords/

by spxdcz • 17 years ago

20 37 17 years ago

robotron• 17 years ago

I have never heard anyone pronounce "oriented" by saying "orientated". Maybe if they were 12?

spxdcz• 17 years ago

We interview quite a few developers, and I'd say about 25% of them pronounce it 'orientated'. Maybe it's a British thing? Most are graduates too, fresh out of college.

bmelton2• 17 years ago

I've heard plenty of US-born / US-raised developers use the term as well. Moreso when I lived in the South than when I moved to the DC metro area.

Another pet peeve of mine are people who "Administrate" computers. I don't know of a polite way to correct them short of correctly using "Administer" in sentences that follow, but I usually come away from that feeling as if they think I'm the one using it incorrectly.

pistoriusp• 17 years ago

Personally I've never heard anyone saying "oriented," or even picked up that it was different from "orientated" until today. The dictionary on OS X says:

orientate |ˈôrēənˌtāt| verb another term for orient.

I suppose that this is just the way that people speak in South Africa? And maybe Britain?

SandB0x• 17 years ago

I've heard it said (in the uk). It seems to identify programmers who don't like and don't read about programming.

alttab• 17 years ago

I'd agree here too - if you enjoy programming enough to read about it, then you'll realize that while some people say "orientated" (be it correct or not), the majority of the industry from the inside uses "oriented."

I've also heard the former and immediately had thoughts along the lines of "they don't truly know OO." In my experience these people did not have an intuitive grasp on it.

silentbicycle5• 17 years ago

The (short) article doesn't really mention OO - it's about shibboleths: terminology whose usage shows whether you're an insider.

joe_bleau• 17 years ago

Yep, and here's a better article from Dr. Dobb's with a bunch of good ones: http://dobbscodetalk.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&sho...

mootothemax• 17 years ago

I've heard coders of all abilities say orientated and oriented, and was under the impression they were interchangeable.

One that I have heard repeatedly is MySequel from the Windows devs, and S-Q-L Server from the other side :)

silentbicycle5• 17 years ago

This is something I wonder about a lot - I'm mostly self-taught, and every once in a while I still get blindsided by the pronunciation of a word I've never heard spoken.

astine3• 17 years ago

There were a lot of home-schoolers where I went to college. You could always tell them because they had very large vocabularies (which they used correctly) but pronounced everything phonetically.

cmgarcia• 17 years ago

I started with PHP/MySQL a few years ago and pronounced it My-S-Q-L. Having only read on web and in book the word, it was only after I began my current position as an ASP.NET/MSSQL developer did I begin hearing it pronounced Sequel. When I started the position, I was actually told that pronouncing it M-S-S-Q-L would result in the entire IT department pegging me as a novice.

I still use S-Q-L.

randallsquared4• 17 years ago

I started as a Linux admin, and moved on to development, and I usually pronounce it "mysequel", though I use "postgres que ell" or just "postgres".

astine3• 17 years ago

Same here, but I'd like to see someone try to pronounce it 'postgresequal.' More likely it'll come out 'postgrequal.'

KWD• 17 years ago

This is one that still irritates me, and heard it misused (by non-windows dev) just this past weekend at a conference. Sequel is a product, S-Q-L is the language.

Of course, this has been going on for awhile. http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=s...

kulkarnic• 17 years ago

Oh, it is called "Sequel Server" within Microsoft, but Wikipedia says "S-Q-L" for the language. Strange... I remember it saying "sequel" some time ago. Is the received pronunciation now C-O-B-O-L too?

cema• 17 years ago

My experience is, in the US they say "s-q-l" in academia and "sequel" in industry. YMMV.

RyanMcGreal2• 17 years ago

I started in the Windows world and moved over to Linux (when I have the choice). I've always called them "My ess queue ell" and "Ess queue ell server", respectively. I actually have to stop myself from cringing when co-workers refer to 'seequel server" because it sounds so awkward.

WorkerBee• 17 years ago

They are interchangeable: http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutgrammar/orie...

I personally used "oriented" - why use a longer word when a shorter one is precisely equivalent? Also, I'm used to it.

gb2• 17 years ago

It's already been mentioned by some commentators, but "orientated" is the norm in British English outside of programming at least.

As an aside, not that I hear people talking about it much, but amongst the people I know it's referred to as "oh oh" anyway.

RyanMcGreal2• 17 years ago

Interesting. In general use, I would assume that "oriented" would mean focused or directed with regards to some kind of value system (e.g. goal-oriented), whereas "orientated" would mean having completed some kind of initiation training (orientation).

nihilocrat• 17 years ago

Has anyone seen a similar effect with UNIX / Linux admins in the pronunciation of /etc? Most newcomers say "et cetera", but veterans tend to say "et-see".

bayleo• 17 years ago

Can you identify novice programmers by how they say 'object orientated'?

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