Old man yells at hacker news

_posts/2019-08-16-i-hate-performant.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "I hate the made up word 'performant'"
+tags:
+- opinion
+---
+
+The tech industry is filled with all sorts of silly jargon and acronyms. Our
+overuse of jargon not only makes us very easy to identify in a crowded
+restaurant but also helps make things confusing for new-comers and veterans
+alike. In my current role, I find myself spending a *lot* of time with vendors
+who also seem to delight in barraging prospects with unpleasant jargon. My
+least favorite word among it all is **performant**.
+
+Our new version is more performant! A performant library for X. A new
+architecture for performant web apps. Etc, etc.
+
+It is absolutely useless and doesn't convey anything meaningful to the reader
+or listener.
+
+I **loathe** this word. 
+
+
+The word itself is a corruption of the word "performance." Most people try to
+use "performant" to convey peak or better performance, and that's where the
+word fails to do any meaningful work.
+
+Consider a web application framework like Rails. For most applications which
+use Rails, there is a web server running the application, a caching layer, a
+database, and potentially a front-end web server.
+
+Now consider the phrase "a performant Ruby on Rails application"
+
+I haven't the slightest clue what this could mean because _performance_ is an
+incredibly complex and layered topic. Peak or optimal performance of a Rails
+application could mean many different things:
+
+* The application has been made smaller or structured in such a way that it
+  loads from disk faster.
+* Template rendering is heavily optimized, perhaps by native extensions
+* Interpreter improvements or options have made execution much faster than
+  previously
+* Data or object structure changes reduced the amount of objects generated,
+  reducing memory pressure and time spent in garbage collection.
+* The use of threads or fibers has allowed the application to serve multiple
+  concurrent requests more efficiently.
+* Effective use of in-memory or network-based caches has made slower queries to
+  data storage less frequent or unnecessary
+* Database queries have been tuned or important columns have been indexed to
+  match the common access patterns needed by the application.
+
+
+"Performant" doesn't convey any of that nuance or detail. It evokes only an
+intangible feeling of "oh this is better" but with no real explanation of how.
+
+I would love for the word to join ranks of jargon like "synergy" and
+"value-proposition" as a target of derision. There are so many great words in
+the English language which we can use to concisely describe the complexity of our
+technology. We don't need to invent newer ones that do a worse job of it.
+