Surveys differ a bit on this but somewhere between 3-10% of women report having been strangled by an intimate partner at some time in their lives, this may be 20% higher when non-intimate partners are also factored in. So like “one in 12” is not crazy-talk. Even if your dev-team right now is all-male, your design docs may live to see you diversify and you probably have female non-technical coworkers who will overhear you talking about it. It's not worth taking a one in 12 chance of potentially reminding them of past domestic abuse, I get that it's not your intention but.
Yes I get that it's by analogy to the “strangler fig,” but ,
(a) it was a crappy analogy in the first place[1],
(b) you can just call it the “strangler-fig pattern” and the extra syllable makes it like 20% more rhythmic, 10% more clear and 50% less alienating without sacrificing any googlability as this is what the cloud companies call it,
(c) you didn't really need the analogy, “migrate” was already the established term of art for this pattern, means the same thing and it is already verb-ified for you! “Our first priority is to migrate all our current requests,” vs “our first priority is to use our strangler-pattern to subsume the current requests under the new architecture,” whyyyyyyyyy. So you're gonna use the word “migrate” anyway and if used precisely[3] there is nothing added by evoking the humble strangler-fig, apart from, you know, accidentally sounding positive with regard to domestic abuse.
1. Taking the definition as “incremental replacement behind a proxy until the original system eventually dies,” literally the only thing that is correct about the analogy is “eventually dies”. Even if you are calling a tree’s contribution to the leaf canopy its “feature set” and the developer attention is its “nutrients” to try to save the analogy, you come to the conclusion that strangler figs do “rapid feature development” at first, rather than trying to rewrite the system. And this early development is symbiotic rather than parasitic [2]. Strangler figs don't do the strangler pattern, they do Embrace-Extend-Extinguish.
3. So, “migrate functionality” is popular but very imprecise, you want to stay that you are migrating the requests, or the request-handling, or the users, to the new platform. The word functionality should probably also be thrown in the trash, it literally adds three clumsy syllables to a word which is already its synonym, the “function” of a thing is already its “functionality” and if you really wanted to not use the mathematical word function, just talked about its “features” or “feature-set.”
I appreciate your intention to care for others, although I disagree with your most of your other arguments. I do find it irrationally irritating that you appear to assume I'm male.
Oh, I didn't mean to do either. (That is, either make a coherent argument per se—just like “here are some reasons that this language sucks” but it does not imply “that is a holistic overview and therefore there are no redeeming qualities and it sucks in all contexts” which is what an argument would look like—or to assume your masculinity—
... like obviously if you were in an all-male dev team you would also be male and so I suppose I should have said “everyone else” but really I just figured you were probably not on an all-male dev team and the problem would be obvious that way.)
