alt Hacker NewsIt's such an odd little subcultural quirk that Fortran (really HPC) people call programs and libraries "codes". Most software folks refer to "code", as if it was a substance like sand or water, and use other words for specific units of "code" (programs, libraries, modules).
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Author of the blog post. It's just being a non-native speaker and writing the blog post by hand shows these little mistakes. I've been using the terms "code" and "codes", but you might very well be right that my usage is not entirely correct. I'll ask native speakers what the proper usage is here.
I guess when you’ve been calling it that before everyone else you’re allowed. Sort of how Common Lisp calls threads ‘processes’.
>Fortran (really HPC) people call programs and libraries "codes".
I think it's a European engineering thing that just sort of caught on, actually. For example when I was in undergrad, my 4th-year computational fluids prof made us use "Code Aster"[0] and "Code Saturne"[1] which are both made by a French lab, I believe. Most of the usage of "code as a countable noun" that I've encountered has origins in English-as-a-second-language projects.
in the ngspice user manual, they call circuit descriptions an "input deck"
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If you want to peer into an alternative reality / funhouse mirror of programming terms, you should look at ALGOL 68. For instance, types are called "modes".
https://jemarch.net/a68-jargon/
(There are also "incestuous unions", which is the actual term used in the spec.)