Deprecation Warning for the Term "Deprecate"

[dreeves]

Desiderata

Beta Give feedback

1. Have someone read a draft
2. Keywords/tags
3. Title image
4. Link preview excerpt
5. Publish
6. Blog blurbs
7. Waggledance
8. Tweet
9. Tip of the day
10. Anki the URL?

Just a random dreevpeeve: Developers saying "deprecated" when they mean "removed" or "disabled". The word "deprecated" just means "disapproved of". In software contexts that's typically because you plan to remove it, not that you actually did already.

It's possible this is a losing battle but dictionaries are on my side for the time being. In addition to the non-software-specific senses, we have this from Google's dictionary (which I normally hate but agrees with Merriam-Webster and other better dictionaries in this case):

(chiefly of a software feature) be usable but regarded as obsolete and best avoided, typically due to having been superseded. "this feature is deprecated and will be removed in later versions"

PS, from ChatGPT, when asked about this misuse of the term:

The term "deprecated" is often misused to mean "no longer supported" or "removed." While "deprecated" means that a feature is discouraged and may be removed in the future, some people mistakenly use it to suggest that the feature is already obsolete or has been removed. This misuse can lead to confusion about the actual status of the feature.

Cognata

• Tweeted at https://twitter.com/bmndr/status/1658217070767800320 but it's 404ing now, what the heck, Twitter?
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deprecation
• https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/deprecate (includes a funny bit about how software people mean sense 4 of the dictionary definition: "(archaic) to pray for deliverance from")

Verbata: danny the nominazi 🧿, arguing with developers, language nerds, descriptivism vs prescriptivism,

[dreeves]

Example today:

We have a redirect in place so it's not urgent but we would appreciate it if you could update any links, so that we can minimize (and hopefully deprecate) use of the redirect!

You're not hopefully deprecating it, you've already deprecated it. What you hope is to actually remove the redirect! (Side debate: I think it's better to just add it to an eternal list of legacy redirects and not worry about how big that list gets. Even over decades it'll stay perfectly wieldy.)