What are the most important concepts to understand for "fluency in developer English"?

Posted by Edward Tanguay on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Edward Tanguay
Published on 2011-01-21T08:05:57Z Indexed on 2012/06/03 22:47 UTC
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In April, I'm going to be giving a talk called **English 2.0 - Understanding the Language of Developers" to a group of English teachers. The purpose is in two hours to give them a quick background in key concepts so that they can better understand developer blogs and podcasts and are able to ask better questions when talking to developers.

What do you think are the most important concepts to understand, concepts that developers take for granted but the general public is not familiar with? Here are a few ideas:

version control
abstractions
pub/sub
push vs. pull
debugging
modularity
three-tier architecture
class/object
"spaghetti code" vs. OOP
exception throwing
crowd sourcing
refactoring
the cloud
DRY - don't repeat yourself
client/server
unit testing
designer/developer

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