When I learned about this stuff years ago with SignalR this was called soft real-time.

My Phoenix channels, your rails action cable, your web sockets: soft real-time.

Real-time was reserved for true real time guaranteed delivery times.

I always heard hard real time for that, and "real time" could refer to either and was often used when talking about game rendering, etc.

> Kind of how you'd say you have a dashboard for your business to see metrics in real time (as opposed to some kind of daily report).

I think calling it a "streaming" or "live streaming" interface is a better descriptor than "real-time".

> I think that usage of real time is very common outside of a pure engineering sense

Maybe, but we're talking about the software engineering world here aren't we? I think we should seek to be precise with our terminology and try to avoid unnecessary ambiguity.

I agree with you and have upvoted your comments, however, I'll also note that we distinguish between different disciplines in software engineering. "Real-time" has a very spceific definition in embedded systems and OSes, but this is clearly high-level application more tied to business logic than, say, rocket control systems.

I think both uses of the term are acceptable in their different contexts. (But yes I also agree "streaming" is a very good term.)

I don’t see why you had to call him out. “REAL TIME” is also an engineering term with a strict definition. If You paid me for a real time stock ticker and you later found out it had a delay of a second or two you would want a refund.

Asking for a real time stock ticker is also not using "real time" as a term of art, having a 2 second delay in stock data might be a failure to deliver on application requirements, but it is not necessarily a failure to deliver a "real time" system if the 2 second delay is strictly reliable.

The non strict usage is far more common then the term of art. One would be well advised not to assume "real time" is being used as a term of art unless specifically called out, or clear from the context.

I'd say common usage of the phrase "real time," means with respect to human perception, and that is how its being used here.

> I'd say common usage of the phrase "real time," means with respect to human perception, and that is how its being used here.

So do you consider YouTube a real-time system? After all, images are moving on your screen "in real-time" from the user's perspective.

It seems to me that these are all streaming systems, and when the data is "live", then it's "live streaming".

Even colloquially, I hazard that "real-time" has some implication that there's some correspondance between your temporal reference frame and the original temporal reference frame. I think the engineering definition just made that correspondance precise.

I'm not speaking to what I consider "real time," I'm speaking to how it is commonly used as a phrase . But given that...

Yes people do say "real time playback" with respect to video. Generally, however, that is only noteworthy to call out when its unusual. Such as "real time 16k playback."

You're not wrong that the distinction isn't terribly important for this story, however that term absolutely has meaning in the world of fintech and places reporting on financial news - near/soft real-time are very distinct from real-time.

It's been 5 years since I've worked in that industry, but I still view the use of "real-time" the same way and can understand some people's issue with the term in this case.