6. PROGR AMMING JARGON¶
In the XKCD comic “Up Goer Five” (https://xkcd.com/1133/), the webcomic’s artist Randall Munroe created a technical schematic for the Saturn V rocket using only the 1,000 most common English words. The comic breaks down all the technical jargon into sentences a young child could understand. But it also highlights why we can’t explain everything using simple terms: The explanation “Thing to help people escape really fast if there’s a problem and everything is on fire so they decide not to go to space” might be easier to understand for a lay audience than “Launch Escape System.” But it’s too verbose for NASA engineers to say in their day- to-day work. Even then, they’d probably rather use the acronym LES.
Although computer jargon can be confusing and intimidating for new programmers, it’s a necessary shorthand. Several terms in Python and software development have subtle differences in meaning, and even experienced developers sometimes carelessly use them interchangeably. The technical definitions for these terms can vary between programming languages, but this chapter covers the terms as they relate to Python. You’ll get a broad, albeit not deep, understanding of the programming language concepts behind them.
This chapter assumes you aren’t yet familiar with classes and object- oriented programming (OOP). I’ve limited the explanations for classes and other OOP jargon here, but the jargon is explained in more detail in Chapters 15 to 17.