It's an aesthetic argument. If you make your constraint tight enough, you're forced into concocting a new word to fix some imagined failing of the existing language. We don't need an adjective that signifies performance and we also don't need an adjective that signifies performance that starts with "perform".
Instead, you can rearrange the wording a little to convey the exact same meaning. By working within the constraints, an elegant solution emerges. By all means add words if they are clever or pleasing or convey a nuance that can't be achieved with what already exists. Performant and functionality don't meet those criteria.
Re:Hacker Newspaper: reformatted Hacker News
by demallien on Tuesday April 14, 2009 @02:30PM
(#561984)
Efficient? At least that's what 7 of 9 always uses... And who's going to argue witha reclaimed borg?
Re:Hacker Newspaper: reformatted Hacker News
by gruseom on Tuesday April 14, 2009 @03:07PM
(#562079)
I would say that "performant" is a narrower term than "efficient", so no, the two don't coincide.
This whole argument is silly, of course. Natural language is so heavily overloaded that you could never regularize it in the way people seem to be proposing, and if you could, you would ruin it.
"Fast"
Boy would you not like my code. It's full of neologisms. Undivify. Wipeage. Calcval. Zillions of them! I'd say this makes my code better English, not worse. I choose words carefully and do not hesitate to make a new one if existing ones don't communicate just what is wanted. It's not an arbitrary process and has nothing to do with sloppiness or vanity. It has to do with making the language fit the problem.
Oh, and I use "performant" all the time, too. What other adjective signifies the qualities that programmers have in mind when they say "performance"?