Thursday, January 24, 2008

Neologism corner: commando

Somebody who chooses to use a command line tool like sqlplus.exe over a GUI.

I coined this unthinkingly in a Forum thread about SQL editors which had descended into another "real programmers use vim" yawn fest. However, Brian Tkatch picked me up on it, so I had to retrofit a justification.

I chose the word because a commando is a member of an elite unit of toughnuts, which would seem to fit the self-image of soi disant real programmers. It was only afterwards that I noticed the resonance with "command line" itself. And it also brings fresh life to the phrase "going commando".

Update


The ever-reliable web-comic xkcd proffers a neat encapsulation of how these conversations tend to go.

1 comment:

Laurent Schneider said...

In commando, you can also roll before disco ;-)


SQL> roll
Rollback complete.
SQL> disco
Disconnected from Oracle Database