Everyday Programming Jargons demystified

You don’t need to be a geek to know these.

Here’s your guide to find the meaning of jargons you hear around. So next you are discussing something with your senior peer. You don’t have to scratch your head.

KISS

KISS Stands for Keep it simple, stupid!. It is a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in 1960 that suggests that systems should be designed to be simple and easy to understand and use, rather than being complex and difficult to understand and use. The idea behind KISS is that simpler systems are often more effective, easier to use, and less prone to errors than more complex ones. KISS is often used as a guideline for designing user interfaces, software, and other systems that need to be easy to use and understand.

DRY

DRY stands for “don’t repeat yourself”. The DRY principle is one of the most important principles in software development. The term was coined in 1999 by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas in their book *The Pragmatic Programmer*. In software engineering, DRY is the principle of reducing repetition in the code, referring back to a single source — or “snippet” — of reusable code whenever you need it.

Example — Assume you have many places in code in that need to be executed based on the logged in user’s role. For instance, createUser() can only be executed if the current user is an administrator or a manager, deleteUser() only if the current user is an administrator etc.

Instead of spreading the logic of checking for a user’s role in both createUser and deleteUser, we could use a single function isPermitted() as below.

//get the current Subject
 Subject currentUser = context.getSubject();
if (isPermitted(currentUser)) {
 //allow execution of deletePage
 } else {
 //block execution
 }

By keeping the logic of isPermitted() to one place, duplication can be avoided and also enables the re-usability of the code. The cherry on top is separation of logic i.e. createUser() and deleteUser() don’t need to know how the permission is checked.

Camel Case

Camel case combines words by capitalising all words except the first one. It is used, in particular, for variable declaration, as follows:

const isUserPermitted = true;

PasCal Case

Pascal case combines words by capitalising all words. It is used, in particular, to name classes:

class sessionService {
 // …
 }

Snake Case

In Snake case each space between the words is replaced with an underscore(_).

const is_user_permitted = true;