• NephewAlphaBravo [he/him]
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    1 year ago

    i have a deep and irrational hatred for the fact that some people call computer programs “apps” now of days

      • FunkyStuff [he/him]
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        321 year ago

        And it’s really not that unreasonable. What the user thinks of as an app could be more than 1 program. It makes sense to put an abstraction between users and programs because lots of sophisticated software use separate programs that the end user doesn’t care about, just the whole.

        • CarbonScored [any]
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          1 year ago

          I don’t think anyone’s saying we should only refer to each individual executable file. Just that ‘apps’ arbitrarily replaced the word ‘program’ with absolutely no change in definition to make it sound New and Marketable tm.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]
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        171 year ago

        An application program is a computer program designed to carry out a specific task

        A howitzer is a projectile weapon designed to fire a specific projectile

        Rejoice, your paint guns are now all howitzers!

        • RION [she/her]
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          61 year ago

          Thankfully the dictionaries get a little more specific. I do want an artillery capable paint gun though, that sounds rad

          • UlyssesT [he/him]
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            81 year ago

            I presented the above as a joke and I had faith that the definition of a howitzer wasn’t that vague to begin with. angery

        • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
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          41 year ago

          The Task Manager in Windows always had an “Applications” tab and a “Processes” tab, going back to Windows 98 at least. “Programs” was always too broad and restricted to being colloquial; the specific word was either application or executable.

          What’s worth ranting about is whether people have stopped understanding “App” as short for something.

    • @Strayce
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      1 year ago

      The l33t w4r3z d00dz were calling applications ‘appz’ since at least the '90s. Then there was that brief period where Apple tried to claim “app store” was short for “apple store” so no one else could say it…

    • stilgar [he/him]
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      171 year ago

      “Some people” includes almost all devs who actually make the apps applications programs though.

      Many of the projects I work on use app to refer to the main object or entrypoint.