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Comment by thrownaway2424 | Hacker News Reader

Performant: still not a word.

Seymour Cray never said "performant". Engineers say "fast" or "fast enough". Marketing types and nontechnical management seem to prefer this neologism. But it might also be a generational thing.

A new coinage that I noticed in the past year that also grates on my ears: "learning" as a substitute for "lesson", as in "what were your learnings from the hackathon?" Anyone else caught this one?

Past year? Past decade champ.

Maybe in Microsoft-land or certain circles, but anecdotally I've only started hearing "learnings" this year too.

"Learnings" sounds like either a Hinglish expression, or maybe Microspeak to my ears.

Yeah, to my ears it sounds like someone is anxious that he won't be taken seriously if he uses a one-syllable word.

Also noticed it several years ago. I may be wrong but to me it seems to have arrived from the same group that's imposed corporate-speak on boardrooms everywhere, including high-profile retreadings of words like synergy and paradigm.

(One of the authors here)

This is by far my favourite post in this entire thread -- I don't think I've ever seen Seymour Cray referenced as an authority in this manner before :)

Not specifically to OP, but for everyone unhappy about the use of performant: Pretty happy to concede that it isn't our finest bit of writing. Pretentiousness? Lack of technical nous? A bit of hurried/careless wording? I'll let you folks decide...

This is the worst use of the neologism I've yet seen:

(1) It's not perfectly clear what the definition is in this particular context. Usually the word is used to indicate "our stuff is rad fast bro" implying that speed is obtained through cleverness such as the use of efficient code or an efficiently scalable architecture, but the linked article violates this definition by comparing apples (CPUs) and oranges (storage). It's nonsensical in the manner of "my word processor is more performant than my fractal renderer".

(2) Normally, use of this neologism saves time by replacing a long phrase. This use in the linked article is backwards: the word "faster" could have been used in place of the longer "more performant."

How do you think new words came about?

By ignoring perfectly good legitimate alternatives and instead inventing words in an effort to make the speaker sound smarter than the listener, of course.

eg "faster"

See also: "utilize" instead of "use."

Brits use "whilst" instead of "while". Thank god they didn't pick the keywords of any programming languages.

    utilise namespace std;
    whilst (performant()) {
      pontificate();
    }

Edit: bonus `problematic` operator for exceptions.

I don't know, I think a "whilst loop" would be kind of charming.

It could mean while-stop or something?!

Utilise is an americanism, we don't use it in Britain (and when I first heard "burglarize" I thought it was a joke). I suspect performant is the same.

Whilst implies parallelism/concurrency, it's not the same thing as while.

Problematic is more a tumblrism than anything else.

Actually, "fast" doesn't mean "performant" (OK, maybe that's not a word, in which case I mean "having high performance"), unless you want to also say "speed" means "performance".

Also "utilize" is more specific than "use": it implies "using for a desirable purpose". Consider:

(1) This daemon process is utilizing all the available bandwidth.

(2) This daemon process is using all the available bandwidth.

Sometimes people making up new words do come across as lazy, but you can easily go too far in the other direction, too.

I have no idea what difference is implied between (1) and (2) there.

What's the difference between speed and performance here?

(1) The bandwidth is being entirely consumed. It is all needed and the process is performing nominally.

(2) The bandwidth is being entirely consumed, but it might only be because the process is misbehaving and consuming more bandwidth than necessary.

Speed only translates to performance if the resource being quickly consumed is actually needed. Example-- a game might always use all CPU cycles, but only when rendering the most challenging scene is reaching peak performance.

Is that difference how people would actually understand the word? I've never (knowingly) heard it used like that. Certainly terms like "CPU utilization" and "network utilization" are frequently used to denote a simple use-divided-by-capacity ratio.

For your game example, I don't see what isn't encompassed by "speed" (how many FPS you get out) or "efficiency" (how much CPU/GPU you use to do it).

A by-product of "high-performance" being coopted a long time ago by "high-performance computing." Seems to me to be a natural part of the evolution of technology.

Not sure it'd explain the origin of the use of this word in english, but performant is a french word that is very often used in this context.

This word is one of my pet peeves as well. "Performant" is an ignorant and foolish way to say "high performance". It's like saying "voltant" instead of "high voltage". I'm all for coining new words that mean new things, but when someone says "performant" I treat it as a clue that they might be a sloppy thinker.

"Performance" sounds like sloppy thinking too. What kind of performance are we talking about? Latency, throughput, false positive rate, false negative rate, click through rate, conversion to sales rate? There are a lot of axes on which to measure performance.

I don't like "performant" as a word, but I also recognize that is an irrational, emotional reaction on my part. I think it's valid to create an adjective that basically means "a thing that has high or acceptable performance". I see no reason to conclude people who use it are sloppy thinkers.

Well, I don't conclude that, just begin to suspect it. But you're right, it's pretty irrational. ;-)

No, it's more like the wealth of other adjectives that follow the pattern of "having/with -ance" -> "-ant". Important, significant, brilliant, vigilant, cognizant, dissonant, exuberant, invariant, radiant, elegant, abundant, ...

I suppose you could say that someone using just about any of those words is trying to sound smart or overly formal, and so we should deny their status as words to bring the speakers down a notch.

"conformant" seems like the strongest analogy.

Thank you.

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