"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I genuinely didn’t think a negative opinion about a marketing word would be this controversial but point well taken. Last time I criticize presentation.

A more engaging summary of the article: Google engineer proposes changes in caching algorithm based on observations from "millions of servers and clients", arguing for improved performance both on low-end (phone) and high-end (hundreds of gigabytes of ram) devices.

Probably would have made a good top-level comment. My comment is about the poor taste of the word “performant”

Performant is a pretty common word in technology, and has been since at least 2003 when I first heard it. It's used in the same vein as "scaleable" - in both cases, suggests the positive nature of the performance and scaling.

Yah, screw anyone who's on the leading edge of linguistic drift!

After all, if someone doesn't properly use the second-person singular pronoun of yore, they're an illiterate scoundrel! Language shouldn't change.

I think your argument has been decimated (which means reduced by a literal 10%; metaphorical and drifting meanings of words are bad!)

The point is that people do not view it as poor language, they understand that it's a protocol for communication and as such it evolves/shifts across time and particularly across generations (Emojis are a great example of this), and view people that look down upon others for relatively benign infractions upon the timeless holy grail that is The Way The English Language Should Be Used as rather pedantic idiots who often bring more disruption to a conversation than clarity.

There is no race to the top or the bottom. There is no race at all. Looking down on someone for their preferred set of words and the way they use them will only make you look bad and at the end of the day prevents you from communicating effectively with other members of your species.

You should work on that.

No I think I’ll continue to judge people for their behavior. I also look down on people when they use “ain’t” instead of “aren’t” or when they don’t correctly conjugate their verbs. Being prevented from communicating with people who fail to speak proper English has little practical downsides and many upsides. Looking bad to those who fail to speak proper English is probably more of an upside as well. An apparent failure to speak English well is indistinguishable from an inability to speak English well.

Demonizing intolerance of poor English does not help to improve anyone’s ability to communicate precisely and efficiently, it just seems to make people feel better about themselves. There’s nothing wrong with setting high standards for people unless you dislike excellence.

If you want to be guided on that lonely and cold road by nothing but a false sense of superiority then it ain't on me to stop you. Just don't be surprised when, or fail to realise why, people judge you right back for your behaviour.

> people judge you right back for your behaviour.

If certain people judge me back for promoting proper English then it’s highly likely their association with me is undesirable in the first place. I prefer to surround myself with people who value excellence, your opinion of what is excellence notwithstanding.

Btw non-native speakers are perfectly capable of speaking proper English and in no way does having a high bar for language exclude them. It is not uncommon for a non-native speaker to speak English better than a native speaker either.

In reality, people can and will always be judged not only for the content of the message but also for their presentation. It’s important that young people learn and accept this to maximize their chances of success.

And excellence is only achieved by having a thoroughbred grasp of the english language? Damn. Sucks to be a non-native speaker then!

I would also add that the truly excellent people in this world would probably not want to surround themselves with you at the first sign of your rather patronizing language superiority complex.

You should judge people for the content of their message, not the exact method of delivery. And in that regard most people will find you severely lacking despite your Flawless Usage Of The Proper Way To Speak English.

Huh? I bet I could come up with a few words and a few different ways of using them that you'd look down on me for. I could probably do it in one word and one usage.

Even deliberately corrupting language can be joyous.

My friends were all telling each other "chillax motherfuton" for awhile because of how it made another friend rage. :D

"relatively benign infractions" is the key part of my reply.

You're doing the same thing that other dude is doing; you just think you're better.

What's wrong with this particular drift though? Presumably you don't hold that all linguistic drift is regrettable?

I’ve made no claim about “linguistic drift,” and I’ve explained many times in this thread why “performant” is in poor taste.

Use of performant in relation to efficiency in this fashion goes back to at least the 60s, from a fairly cursory glance on https://books.google.com.

Starting with a few from the 70s:

The IEEE from 1979: https://books.google.com/books?id=IJ4XAQAAMAAJ&q=%22performa... "It should be noted that the problem of scailing is considerably simplified from the fact that the operators dispose of greater ranges ( from 1 to 238 for l - 20 , instead of 1 to 104 for the more performant analog computers "

We can even step outside of the electrical engineering community, here's a reference to it from the Iron and Steel society, in the same year: https://books.google.com/books?id=D9RaAAAAYAAJ&q=%22performa... "As this cooling system revealed itself as unsufficiently performant , we have started with the study of literature in order to define if other more efficient equipments were available"

We can push back to 1974, in relation to satellites in space: https://books.google.com/books?id=ZXHvAAAAMAAJ&q=%22performa... "So , the program is very descriptive in the effects development , and very performant . Furthermore , it has been compared with numerical integration at each step ( after the computation of each effect and each coupling )..."

Or just a little further in relation to APL from the ACM: https://books.google.com/books?id=0qApAQAAIAAJ&q=%22performa... "However , this theorical gain is nothing but an encouragement ; the execution phasis is very performant because , before it , a lot of preparation has been done during the deferment phasis : this should be taken into account in a realistic ..."

So in the 60s, 1964: https://books.google.com/books?id=l1_vAAAAMAAJ&q=%22performa... Such a progress comes partially from the availability of faster and larger computers and of more performant numerical methods . It is however important to remark that , at the same time , analytic progress has also been achieved , which is very ..."

Australian Mechanical Engineer are using it in relation to the Wankel engine, https://books.google.com/books?id=rzIiAQAAMAAJ&q=%22performa...

Judging from the uses I'm seeing in the Google search, it's a fair claim that Computer Science has been using "performant" in reference to efficiency and performance for most of its existence.

Judging people for using a word in a way that has that much history in the field tends to reflect mostly on you.

You can quote a million papers from your cursory Google Books search, it’s still poor English in addition to being vague and essentially meaningless in most contexts. In nearly every instance it can be replaced with “good” or just dropped altogether with no loss of information, appeals to authority notwithstanding. I’ve rarely regretted judging someone’s intelligence based on their use of “performant,” it has a surprisingly high SNR.

It doesn't matter if you can or cannot replace it with other words. It's what the industry has decided is an appropriate term to use in the circumstances.

> in addition to being vague and essentially meaningless in most contexts

It's not vague, it has a literal meaning. Efficient. The definition comes from the French word "performant", the meaning of which goes back to the 17th century.

This isn't people going "ohh it's related to performance, let's make up a word that sounds similar", like "supposably" or similar.

It's "Let's take an established word with the same roots that has the same meaning as we want and use it".

> It's not vague, it has a literal meaning. Efficient.

See a sister thread for commenters mock debating over whether it means improved throughput or reduced latency. If a speaker indeed intends to mean “efficient,” then it would be thoughtful to opt to instead use “efficient” for clarity’s sake. Performant has been so often recklessly used that the meaning has been diluted to mean general and vague “fastness,” from which most thoughtful people cannot glean any specific meaning.

> You can quote a million papers from your cursory Google Books search

Still better data than the literally nothing that you brought to the discussion so far.

“Literally nothing” is false:

> In nearly every instance it can be replaced with “good” or just dropped altogether with no loss of information,

That is obviously true and easily checkable. If that is not true, explain how in rational terms.

> Multigenerational LRU: better, more versatile, more straightforward than Linux's

> Multigenerational LRU: more versatile, straightforward than Linux's

Neither of these have as much information as the original headline. The version I came up with that's actually equivalent to the original without using the word "performant" has to use a word that means the same thing.

> Multigenerational LRU: faster, more versatile, more straightforward than Linux's

And that still means I don't get to use the "parallel more" construct.

"performs better" the dictionary will catch up

edit - apparently oxford dictionary has it already as "performs well"

“Performs better” is just as vague. What does it mean to perform? What does it mean to do it better? Most of the time people actually mean “more efficient CPU usage”

for this case where the thing is a cache and the description a headline, "more performant" seems perfectly cromulent. it says here's a cache that does all the stuff a cache is expected to do well but better

Performant is problematic because it's tech jargon that is only now gaining grudging acceptance as a word in the overall population.

It's not wrong, but it's best avoided if you want to avoid pedants waving their King's English stick at you.

FYI “problematic” is also a vague and essentially meaningless term that is no more specific than “bad.”

English has lots of words that mean mostly the same thing. Do you seethe at every entry in a thesaurus? How does one determine which word is blessed by the higher minded beings you choose to exclusively associate with?

I don’t usually seethe, it’s more like remote embarrassment. I think there is a German word for that. I often recommend a “non-hire” as well.

Edit: I changed “non hire” to “non-hire” because I have no personal issue with acknowledging my usage of improper punctuation. Why should it be controversial to point out usage of improper vocabulary in others?

FYI, non-hire is the type of phrase that should be hyphenated.

Problematic is just fine, brah-- with usage dating to the late 17th century and with a pretty clear connotation of "presenting numerous problems" instead of just being undesirable/bad.

I suggest "performy" and "problemy" as shorter. (Although many people seem to think length a virtue in words) And instead of "more performant" – "performore"?!

Take it up with the people who coined problematic 4 centuries ago.

Seems like a very proactive development

So, we need words that say on what dimension it is performing better.

I hereby coin “latencyant” and “throughputant”.

If a system is highly latencyant, does that mean it performs well in terms of latency, or does it mean it exhibits high latency?

I was thinking “lower latency”. Is there a suffix that means “less of”? “Timeless” is already taken...

Well, there are hypo- and hyper-.

Now I like hypolatent and throughputful.

latencyless and throughputful?

latencyette and throughputous?

latencycule and throughputty?

what about hit rate and time and space efficiency? i think "cachy" says it all - the cachiest cache