Recently, I read a question that I simply didn’t know the answer to:
What is Boxing?
I “knew” to some degree that it was related to conversion - but that was it.
Thinking through that a little more, realizing that I’ve been a developer for over 15 years - over 10 professionally, and I didn’t know that answer. It bugged me. It got me thinking about other terms in software development that, maybe I’ve heard, but don’t really know the answer to either.
Hence this new blog series that I’m coining as “The Software Developers’ Dictionary”. Simply put, I plan on blogging about these terms I run across (boxing, covariance, contravariance, etc.), defining them in plain English with some type of sample code (probably C#, cause that’s what I do). And, to be honest, I’m doing this for me (although I would hope it helps at least ONE other person out there :) ). I know these terms are searchable on Google, Wikipedia, etc., but I feel like the exercise of writing it out with sample code will solidify it for me.
I’m not going to go in any specific order (alphabetical, etc.), because I just don’t know what terms I even plan to define here yet (outside of a small handful).
Eventually, depending on how many of these I do, I’ll pull all the individual posts into a table of contents, for easier navigation.
Stay tuned for the first entry coming later this week on, “Boxing”.
Oh, and, dear reader, if you have suggestions, please comment below and let me know.
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