Apr 29
AJAX is a cleaning product
Whenever I find a person using the damned awful term “AJAX” to refer to the use of XmlHttpRequest to fetch data asyncronously in a Javascript program, they instantly get +500 idiot points in my mental intelligence map. We do not need yet more pseudo-funny acronyms floating around to describe years old technology.
It serves only to massage the egos of the people talking about it by making them think they’re “on the cutting edge”, when they’ve instead been suckered into a fad/meme that’s been used by professional developers for years. Since the mass marketisation of programming patterns (a good thing), I’m seeing people misuse the terminology far too much (a bad thing). I’ll post on this in more detail later.
June 8th, 2005 at 8:53 pm
I’d like to see more people start cleaning up the terminology. What tends to happen is that a researcher makes up some terminology that’s not widely understood and just makes sence in a niche. When someone makes a working app, usually they clean things up a bit (not always). When marketing takes over they’ll do a combination of fixing up terminology and making buzzwords. It’s not until the idea’s been taught a lot and published in a few books that the terminology really gets cleaned up.
We could do our part by offering new sets of terminology that make more sense. Ideally their meaning would be fairly intuitive so when you used them people that use the old terms would know what you’re talking about. If we’re lucky, they might catch on.