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Cool stuff, but can I be crotchety for a sec? I wish we could dispense with all of the cute names given to features, techniques, abstraction, etc that are not intuitive until someone tells you what it means.

No one would have any idea what the hell "tab warming" means without being told, which seems unnecessary for something that is a simple concept to understand. It increases the cognitive load in a field that already has a lot of it. Please just give your hack and techniques descriptive names; or better yet, think long and hard whether or not the thing even needs a name. "pre-render on hover" would suffice. It's one more word and I know exactly what it means instantly.



I understand your point, but in this case I understood the concept of tab warming upon reading the name.


Seconded. I knew exactly what concept was going to be introduced the moment I read "tab warming".


I don't know how one can be in IT and never hear about "cold boot/warm boot" or "code hot swapping" (as opposed to "cold" launch) or "warmed up VM" or a hundred other examples, all of which have exactly the same semantics.

It is especially confusing to read this from JS developer, where one of the greatest advantages of development environment is precisely hot swapping.


In context, sure. To be fair, the article's title used the phrase in context. Once you name something, you invite that name to be used both in and out of context, which will lead to confusion. That was my general point, although I made it more concrete than I should've by saying "no one would know what the hell....."


This is an internal name for a feature that works transparently. No end user needs to know about this.


Seems like it crossed the barrier from internal to external once a blog post was made about it and it was published to HN. Just saying.


Because we develop in the open and the blog post gives an extra glimpse behind the curtain. Call it code name rather than internal name if that makes more sense to you. Bottom line is, the term isn't expected to make sense to end users, and those who are interested in software development should expect jargon.


Agreed. I don't know why they keep coming up with these unintuitive naming systems.




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