A couple of wonderful words have come Editorland's way recently. One is a tech term, "automagically," to describe processes that happen in the background of a computer application to produce desired results without the user knowing why or how.
The other, even more wonderful, is "voorwerp," a new class of astronomical object just discovered by a Dutch schoolteacher, Hanny van Arkel. Reuters describes a voorwerp as "a cosmic ghost, a strange gaseous object with a hole in the middle."
Originally known as "Hanny's voorwerp" (the Dutch word for object), voorwerp seems to be taking its place in the scientific lexicon along with such other delights as "charmed quarks." I'm thinking of automagically combining the two concepts above. The computer techs I work with engage in something called object-oriented programming (OOP); in its stranger, more gaseous aspects, I'd like to propose that this be called voorwerp-oriented programming, or VOOP.
Voorwerps, incidentally, are green.
1 comments:
I think VOOP can definitely work as a derogatory term for poorly implemented software.
It looks fine from the outside, but closer inspection reveals nebulous code with large holes in functionality.
Windows Vista, for example, might be an example of Microsoft pioneering VOOP.
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