Using technical terms without checking for understanding

When geeks try to teach non-geeks about technical matters, they often
make heavy use of technical terminology because it’s the most concise
and accurate way to convey their thoughts. Unfortunately, many
non-geeks cannot understand such jargon and thus grow confused or
frustrated.

Non-geeks might perceive geeks as being snooty and elitist by talking to
them using cryptic ‘geek-speak’, but in fact, I suspect that their
intentions are more innocent: Geeks often don’t remember what it was
like not to have an understanding of technical concepts, especially
related to their area of expertise such as computers or electronic
gadgets. Thus, when communicating with non-geeks, they often throw
around technical terms without first tactfully checking to see whether
listeners know what these terms mean. In the geek’s mind, technical
jargon (e.g., router, dongle) and especially acronyms (e.g., DVI,
TCP/IP, SQL) sound as natural and colloquial as regular English
words. “How could anyone NOT know what these words mean?”

While I’m definitely guilty of throwing jargon into explanations when I’m at least half-conscious that the other party doesn’t understand it, I’d say that it’s usually (for me and many who I know) for a different reason. Or, more accurately, a combination of reasons that I’ll call “the expectation of effort” and “the Google effect”. Firstly, among most geeks (and definitely those of us in the open source world) there’s an expectation that people are interested, are curious, and will research something that they don’t know about when they hear it. The second part is what I call “the Google effect”; most of us geeks do most of our communication (especially about technical things) at a computer, whether via email, IM, forums, or chat. Therefore, there’s usually an expectation that if someone doesn’t understand a term, the answer is as easy as Ctrl+T and typing the term into Google.

I also must take exception to one other item in the article:

Favoring complexity and detail over simplicity in descriptions

When a geek is describing his latest pet project, he often tries to make
his descriptions sound complicated and detailed, in order to convey
the sophistication of his technical prowess.

I’ve described plenty of my projects to plenty of people, and yes, my descriptions are generally very detailed. But it’s not out of any desire to convey sophistication or prowess – my description may be the same whether I’m telling it to someone who can’t operate a computer or someone of much greater skill than my own. It’s simply the burning need to be accurate and complete. Put as simply and generally as possible, if I’m describing a project, I don’t want whoever I’m talking to to ask questions when I’m done describing it. It’s like documentation – if I were writing a man page, whoever reads it shouldn’t be left with major questions to ask when they finish.

I was pretty bored working on assignments for my Database Technologies class the other day. I had also recently purchased a copy of The New Hacker’s Dictionary (the printed edition of The Jargon File) from Amazon and was reading through it. For those of you who aren’t familiar with The Jargon File, it’s the standard glossary of the wonderful terms thrown around by us geeks and hackers, as well as a source for definitions of the many words that have fallen out of favor… well… when people stopped logging in to mainframes to write their thesi. It’s currently at version 4.4.7 and is painstakingly maintained by ESR.

Anyway, I happened to be randomly flipping around the book, and landed on the entry for zeroth on page 501, which made reference to fencepost errors on page 187. What a pain to find! So, I stopped by the listing of alternate views of the Jargon File… but found all of the ones marked as searchable to be gone. So…

Over the course of a few days (I guess it’s an example of how time can be made – I did this during the final week of the semester, exams and all, and finished all of my classes as well as this project) I downloaded the DocBook XML, wrote a few scripts to parse it out and put it in a MySQL database (complete with cross-references, indexes, and (hopefully soon) full-text searching).Then, I added a simple web interface allowing various types of searches and listings.

Though the project was done more to occupy myself and get a little more experience with PHP parsing XML and doing full-text searches, hopefully I’ll have the time to finish it up – there are still a few minor bugs (the parsing lost some of the formatting of ASCII art… I think there’s a trim() that got stuck in there somewhere) and I’d like to implement full-text searching of definitions, overall it was a fun project, given that I did it in about 4 days while working and finishing up school.

If you’re looking for a searchable, cross-referenced version of the Jargon File online (complete with revision history and comments), take a look at The Jargon File on JasonAntman.com. There’s a search function, listing by first letter, one-page listing of all entries, and hopefully a few other goodies soon. Most importantly, though the documentation is sparse right now, the scripts used to parse the XML, cleanup the database and display/search everything are available for anyone who wants them.