This blog will be about stuff I run into in my software development life, which mainly happens in Python and sometimes Objective C. The rest of this post is some random meanderings on the blog name.
For a long time, I have enjoyed using the word “defrobnication”, just because I’ve liked the way it sounds, in a Lewis Carroll kind of a way. I have no idea where I first heard it, but a Googly search reveals that it’s in relatively common usage, especially in software.
In fact, there are definitions online for “frobnicate”, for example:
/frob'ni-kayt/ (Possibly from frobnitz, and usually abbreviated to frob, but "frobnicate" is recognised as the official full form). To manipulate or adjust, to tweak.
...
Usage: frob, twiddle, and tweak sometimes connote points along a continuum. "Frob" connotes aimless manipulation, ...
OK, so “defrobnication” must mean the act of countering aimless manipulation, which sounds like a good thing, especially in coding, where the Siren songs of over-generalization and premature optimizations can be hard to resist! On the other hand, I found the following entry for “frobnication”:
Frobnication, or frobnificationisation, when applied to language is the unecessessary elongification and mispronounciatification or general sensibilitification of words
Hm, so actually “defrobnication” is already a frobnication. Maybe I should have called this blog “antidisenfrobnicationism” for full ironic effect?
