From Newsgroup: comp.misc

The word “performant” seems to date to the early 19th century, and
then died out. However, according to <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/performant>:

Usage notes

The word performant has found a niche in the 21st century through
adoption in computing contexts, but remains otherwise practically
unknown in day-to-day communication, where more common
alternatives (such as high-performance, efficient or effective)
are typically adopted.

Would you agree that it is very much a niche usage?
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

In article <10f1i18$1am4s$1@dont-email.me>,
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

The word performant has found a niche in the 21st century through
adoption in computing contexts, but remains otherwise practically
unknown in day-to-day communication, where more common
alternatives (such as high-performance, efficient or effective)
are typically adopted.

Would you agree that it is very much a niche usage?

I spend all my life in computing contexts, and have never heard anyone
say the word. But then I had never heard anyone say "informatics"
until our department was renamed to that. Both sound like the sort of
made-up English found in EU technical documents.

-- Richard
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On 12/11/2025 13:25, Richard Tobin wrote:

In article <10f1i18$1am4s$1@dont-email.me>,
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

The word performant has found a niche in the 21st century through
adoption in computing contexts, but remains otherwise practically
unknown in day-to-day communication, where more common
alternatives (such as high-performance, efficient or effective)
are typically adopted.

Would you agree that it is very much a niche usage?

I spend all my life in computing contexts, and have never heard anyone
say the word. But then I had never heard anyone say "informatics"
until our department was renamed to that. Both sound like the sort of made-up English found in EU technical documents.

The second of those ('informatics') /was/ invented by the EU, at the
same time as it invented 'telematics'. I was in the Telematics
directorate when these terms were coined. The joke was that two
conjoined affixes (a prefix and a suffix) don't make much sense.

However the meaning was clear - information technology over a network.

Can I ask - when was your university department renamed to Informatics?
(My bet is on the 1990s, the start of the internet.)
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

The word “performant” seems to date to the early 19th century, and
then died out. [...]
Would you agree that it is very much a niche usage?

At least according to the OED, it had a different meaning in the 19th
century: Coleridge used it to mean "performer".

I've seen it used to mean "high performance" increasingly often in
computer science over the last ten years, and like Richard I get the
impression that it came from speakers of other languages who assumed the
word existed in English.

I always push back against it when I see my students using it -- not
because the word doesn't exist, but because it's meaningless unless you
say what types of performance you care about. Does a "performant"
network application mean high bandwidth, low latency, low CPU load, low
energy usage, or what?
--
Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org> <http://offog.org/>
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org> writes:

Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

The word “performant” seems to date to the early 19th century, and
then died out. [...]
Would you agree that it is very much a niche usage?

At least according to the OED, it had a different meaning in the 19th century: Coleridge used it to mean "performer".

I've seen it used to mean "high performance" increasingly often in
computer science over the last ten years, and like Richard I get the impression that it came from speakers of other languages who assumed the
word existed in English.

I first heard it from a native English speaker about a quarter of a
century ago.
--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

In article <mnjebvFb8p4U1@mid.individual.net>,
occam <occam@nowhere.nix> wrote:

Can I ask - when was your university department renamed to Informatics?
(My bet is on the 1990s, the start of the internet.)

It was 1998, and didn't really have anything to do with the internet.
Several departments were merged (including AI, CS, and CogSci) and
they probably wanted a word that didn't have too specific a meaning.

-- Richard
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) wrote or quoted:

In article <mnjebvFb8p4U1@mid.individual.net>,
occam <occam@nowhere.nix> wrote:

Can I ask - when was your university department renamed to Informatics?
(My bet is on the 1990s, the start of the internet.)

It was 1998, and didn't really have anything to do with the internet.
Several departments were merged (including AI, CS, and CogSci) and
they probably wanted a word that didn't have too specific a meaning.

|Computer science is not a science.
|It's also not about computers.
- Hal Abelson


--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On 12 Nov 2025 19:56:21 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:

|Computer science is not a science.
|It's also not about computers.
- Hal Abelson

No doubt that quote wasn’t actually from anybody named Hal Abelson ...
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On 13/11/25 06:02, Richard Tobin wrote:

In article <mnjebvFb8p4U1@mid.individual.net>, occam
<occam@nowhere.nix> wrote:

Can I ask - when was your university department renamed to
Informatics? (My bet is on the 1990s, the start of the internet.)

It was 1998, and didn't really have anything to do with the
internet. Several departments were merged (including AI, CS, and
CogSci) and they probably wanted a word that didn't have too specific
a meaning.

Those too-frequent universiity mergers have a lot to answer for. All too
often they are based on shaky logic.

One big change at my university (Newcastle, NSW) was when the Faculty of Mathematics was abolished. At that time the Faculty had three
departments: methematics, statistics, and computer science. The plan was
that mathematics would go into the Faculty of Science (not too
illogical), statistics would go into the Faculty of Medicine
(questionable), and computer science would go into the business school.

The CS people were horrified. They had nothing in common with the
business people. Moverover, they felt that their reputation would be
damaged if they were to be given responsibility for the Mickey Mouse
subject called Info Science 101.

We in Electrical Engineering then proposed that CS be merged with the EE department, and that's what happened. It wasn't that we felt that CS was
an engineering discipline. We just wanted to rescue the CS people from a
fate worse than death.
--
Peter Moylan peter@pmoylan.org http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On Thu, 13 Nov 2025 08:53:51 +1100, Peter Moylan wrote:

We in Electrical Engineering then proposed that CS be merged with the EE department, and that's what happened. It wasn't that we felt that CS was
an engineering discipline. We just wanted to rescue the CS people from a
fate worse than death.

Funny how, in the early days (e.g. 1940s/50s/60s), many Comp Sci
disciplines started within electrical/electronic engineering departments. ENIAC was seen as mainly an electronics hardware project for much of its
early years -- nobody saw software programming as a particularly
challenging intellectual activity back then, so it was left to “mere” women to carry out <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buAYHonF968>.

Would you believe, I just checked MIT, and eecs.mit.edu still exists ...
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On 12 Nov 2025 19:56:21 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:

|Computer science is not a science.

At one time, you could say that physics and mathematics were the twin
pillars on which the rest of the sciences were built.

Lately, a third pillar is coming into place: computer science. Why is it
being seen as so fundamental? Because of new ideas like the crossover
between computability and physics <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Chaitin>.
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

In article <y2awm3vgzfr.fsf@offog.org>, Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org> wrote:

I always push back against it when I see my students using it -- not
because the word doesn't exist, but because it's meaningless unless you
say what types of performance you care about. Does a "performant"
network application mean high bandwidth, low latency, low CPU load, low >energy usage, or what?

If your computer is not performant, maybe you need a CPU with higher
mippage, or maybe you need more core, or maybe you need more baud.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOliveiro?= <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Thu, 13 Nov 2025 08:53:51 +1100, Peter Moylan wrote:

We in Electrical Engineering then proposed that CS be merged with the EE
department, and that's what happened. It wasn't that we felt that CS was
an engineering discipline. We just wanted to rescue the CS people from a
fate worse than death.

Funny how, in the early days (e.g. 1940s/50s/60s), many Comp Sci
disciplines started within electrical/electronic engineering departments.

In the seventies and eighties there were two kinds of CS programs, the
ones that came out of EE departments and the ones that came out of math departments. They were often dramatically different in their approach
and it wasn't until the ACM curriculum of the mid-1980s that this really changed and some degree of uniformity appeared.

Of course, now we DO have CS departments that have sprung from the heads
of business programs. They are not very CS-like.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On 2025-11-12 17:54, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:

On Thu, 13 Nov 2025 08:53:51 +1100, Peter Moylan wrote:

We in Electrical Engineering then proposed that CS be merged with the EE
department, and that's what happened. It wasn't that we felt that CS was
an engineering discipline. We just wanted to rescue the CS people from a
fate worse than death.

Funny how, in the early days (e.g. 1940s/50s/60s), many Comp Sci
disciplines started within electrical/electronic engineering departments. ENIAC was seen as mainly an electronics hardware project for much of its early years -- nobody saw software programming as a particularly
challenging intellectual activity back then, so it was left to “mere” women to carry out <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buAYHonF968>.

I was on a disk repair course with CDC in Minneapolis. The instructor
asked us to introduce ourselves, and tell the class if we had ended up
in a job that we had wanted to be in when we were in our teens.

I answered that I had wanted to be in n electronics job, but ended up in
the computer business instead, and that I was probably happier because
of that.

It baffled him. He thought of computer repair as being a job in electronics.

Would you believe, I just checked MIT, and eecs.mit.edu still exists ...

--
To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion
To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion

--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On Wednesday or thereabouts, Scott Dorsey declared ...

In article <y2awm3vgzfr.fsf@offog.org>, Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org> wrote:

I always push back against it when I see my students using it -- not
because the word doesn't exist, but because it's meaningless unless you
say what types of performance you care about. Does a "performant"
network application mean high bandwidth, low latency, low CPU load, low
energy usage, or what?

If your computer is not performant, maybe you need a CPU with higher mippage, or maybe you need more core, or maybe you need more baud.
--scott

Sorry, these days it's all about the FLOPS.

-d
--
"I'm glad unicorns don't ever need upgrades."
"We are as up as it is possible to get graded!"
_Phoebe and Her Unicorn_, 2016.05.15
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

Le 12/11/2025 à 12:25, Richard Tobin a écrit :

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

The word performant has found a niche in the 21st century through
adoption in computing contexts, but remains otherwise practically
unknown in day-to-day communication, where more common
alternatives (such as high-performance, efficient or effective)
are typically adopted.

Would you agree that it is very much a niche usage?

I spend all my life in computing contexts, and have never heard anyone
say the word. But then I had never heard anyone say "informatics"
until our department was renamed to that. Both sound like the sort of made-up English found in EU technical documents.

EU? 'Performant' is an unremarkable adjective in French:

<https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/performant/59514> :

« Qui obtient des résultats remarquables eu égard aux moyens mis en
œuvre. » Which yields remarkable results given the means employed.

<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=performant%2Cperformant%3Afre&year_start=1900&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false>

The graph is not evidence of verbal migration, however.

--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

Le 13/11/2025 à 06:09, Hibou a écrit :

EU? 'Performant' is an unremarkable adjective in French:

<https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/performant/59514> :

« Qui obtient des résultats remarquables eu égard aux moyens mis en œuvre. » Which yields remarkable results given the means employed.

<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph? content=performant%2Cperformant%3Afre&year_start=1900&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false>

The graph is not evidence of verbal migration, however.

Interesting, though, that 'performant''s decline in BrE correlates with
Brexit (vote in 2016, implementation in 2020).

<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28performant%3Aeng_gb*30%29%2C%28performant%3Aeng_us*30%29%2Cperformant%3Afre&year_start=1950&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false>

I remind myself that correlation is not causation.

--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc


kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:

Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOliveiro?= <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

Funny how, in the early days (e.g. 1940s/50s/60s), many Comp Sci
disciplines started within electrical/electronic engineering departments.

In the seventies and eighties there were two kinds of CS programs, the
ones that came out of EE departments and the ones that came out of math departments. They were often dramatically different in their approach
and it wasn't until the ACM curriculum of the mid-1980s that this really changed and some degree of uniformity appeared.

1964, UMass, a course called "computer programming" was offered. The instructor was seconded from industry, not regular faculty. He
proposed to teach a math course in "numerical methods". Most of the
class announced that they'd drop the course if he didn't teach how to
actually program a computer rather than a math subject. His protests
that you couldn't write a useful program if you didn't understand
numerical methods were to no avail.

So he bit the bullet and taught us (some version of?) Fortran which we
happily tried out with punch cards on the school's IBM 1620.

I had no further encounters with computers until I got a chance to
dick around with BASIC on a friend's Apple ][ many years later.
--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On 13/11/25 18:11, Mike Spencer wrote:

kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:

Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOliveiro?= <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

Funny how, in the early days (e.g. 1940s/50s/60s), many Comp Sci
disciplines started within electrical/electronic engineering
departments.

In the seventies and eighties there were two kinds of CS programs,
the ones that came out of EE departments and the ones that came out
of math departments. They were often dramatically different in
their approach and it wasn't until the ACM curriculum of the
mid-1980s that this really changed and some degree of uniformity
appeared.

1964, UMass, a course called "computer programming" was offered.
The instructor was seconded from industry, not regular faculty. He
proposed to teach a math course in "numerical methods". Most of the
class announced that they'd drop the course if he didn't teach how
to actually program a computer rather than a math subject. His
protests that you couldn't write a useful program if you didn't
understand numerical methods were to no avail.

So he bit the bullet and taught us (some version of?) Fortran which
we happily tried out with punch cards on the school's IBM 1620.

I had no further encounters with computers until I got a chance to
dick around with BASIC on a friend's Apple ][ many years later.

My introduction to Fortran came at the end of 1967, which was at the end
of my third year of university. I got a vacation job at a research organisation, and my project there (a problem in heat transfer) required
a lot of numerical calculation. My boss just said "Look in the library,
there should be a book on computer programming there." In his view (and
mine too) learning Fortran was just a matter of looking up the manual.
We didn't have punched cards; I had to use punched paper tape. That made editing harder.

At the beginning of 1968, before university resumed, I was supposed to
do a 3-week Fortran intensive course. I asked for an exemption on the
grounds that I was already experienced in Fortran. The person who
assessed my program listings nearly refused the exemption, on the
grounds that I was using an inefficient way of computing Bessel
functions. (Not surprising. Before that vacation job I had never heard
of Bessel functions, and I couldnt't just google it.) In the end he did concede that I knew how to use Fortran.

In the middle of 1968, one of our programming assignments was to work
out what value of a capacitance was needed to give a certain filter
circuit a specified bandwidth. An elegant solution to the problem was to
use a successive approximation method of solving an equation of the form f(x)=0. That would have been easy, except that it turned out that
computing f(x) required solving another equation g(y)=0. That would have
been straightforward in a modern programming language, but Fortran IV
did not permit recursive subroutine calls. My contribution to elegance
was to figure out a way to emulate recursion. I don't know what the
person grading the assignments thought of that, but I did get the right
answer.

By the way, the way we submitted work was to put our card deck into a
box, where it was transported to the computer centre. The next day our
deck would come back, accompanied by a printout that was the result of
running our program. From that we had to figure out what we had done
wrong, and update the card deck. (That was a stock-standard approach
back when everything had to be done, one job at a time, by the computer operator.) After a while I became aware that somebody else was copying
my card deck. So I completed my assignment solution -- a different
assignment from the one above -- and then saved that card deck. Then I introduced some errors into my program, and continued to submit the
faulty program. The day before the result was due, too late for the
cheater to recover, I restored the correct solution.

Ah, memory. That same year I had to write up a minor thesis on the Fast
Fourier Transform. Today everyone knows what an FFT is, but back then it
was new research. I could meet the requirements by writing up the
history of the development of the FFT, and its major variants, but for a
good thesis I felt I should implement all those variants, and do things
like timing tests. But to implement the algorithms I needed a couple of
small functions coded in assembly language [1]. That was a radical idea
back when assembly language was felt to be the property of the high
priests. I had to have an interview with the head of the CS department,
where I had to explain what those functions were, why I needed them, and
how I proposed to implement them. I think he was upset that a mere
electrical engineering student would presume to do advanced programming,
but in the end he have me permission to use assembly language on his
sacred machine.

[1] That was then, this is now. Now I know how to do the job without
assembly language. (And without Fortran.) But I was a mere beginner in
those days.

History repeats itself. Just a few years ago, after my retirement from
the university, I was given the job of designing a smart high-voltage protection relay. (The application was in coal mining, where the
electrical noise is at a level you wouldn't believe.) To extract the higher-frequency components of the noise, I needed an FFT with an
execution time in the millisecond range. In the end I designed an FFT implementation so efficient that I can't read my own code[2]. But it
worked, and the relay got an award.

[2] Method:
(a) Do an FFT implementation in a high-level language (I used Modula-2).
(b) Do some code optimisations, like unwrapping the outermost loop.
(c) Continue doing testing and tweaks to improve the code.
(d) Translate the result into C, which is what the customer wants.
The result is not very readable, but it runs like the clappers.
--
Peter Moylan peter@pmoylan.org http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> wrote or quoted:

Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada

The other day, I read something from a Canadian man named
"Spencer". But his full name was Henry Spencer. In 1990,
he wrote "awf", an implementation of "nroff -man" in awk!

Regarding "performant": It's a German word too, and it has the
same status as in English: Not part of the general language
but computer jargon. Can be found in some German dictionaries:

|* "performant" per|for|mạnt 〈Adj.〉 [zu engl. performance =
|Leistung] (EDV): leistungsfähig, gut funktionierend:
|ein -es Notebook; die Datenspeicherung ist zuverlässig und p.

. This is from older postings in alt.usage.english, where it
was apparently applied to cats:

. . .
|I've never thought before that a "good cat" means a performant
. . .
|The same with a "good wife", not necessarily a performant mouser, but
. . .


--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

In article <mnlb0pFkoo9U2@mid.individual.net>,
Hibou <vpaereru-unmonitored@yahoo.com.invalid> wrote:

I spend all my life in computing contexts, and have never heard anyone
say the word. But then I had never heard anyone say "informatics"
until our department was renamed to that. Both sound like the sort of
made-up English found in EU technical documents.

EU? 'Performant' is an unremarkable adjective in French:

As is "informatique". But we probably wouldn't have picked them up
from the French directly. The EU has in recent times been the route
into English for many such words, as documents written in one language
are translated into those of the other member countries.

(English is of course still an official EU language.)

-- Richard
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On 13/11/25 23:11, Richard Tobin wrote:

(English is of course still an official EU language.)

Thank the Irish for that. If they choose instead to make Irish their
official EU language, the UK is screwed.
--
Peter Moylan peter@pmoylan.org http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

Richard Tobin <richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> wrote:

In article <mnlb0pFkoo9U2@mid.individual.net>,
Hibou <vpaereru-unmonitored@yahoo.com.invalid> wrote:

I spend all my life in computing contexts, and have never heard anyone
say the word. But then I had never heard anyone say "informatics"
until our department was renamed to that. Both sound like the sort of
made-up English found in EU technical documents.

EU? 'Performant' is an unremarkable adjective in French:

As is "informatique". But we probably wouldn't have picked them up
from the French directly. The EU has in recent times been the route
into English for many such words, as documents written in one language
are translated into those of the other member countries.

(English is of course still an official EU language.)

'Still'?
Officially all 24 languages of the EU are 'working languages',
but only three are commonly used. (English, French, and German)
The others are almost always translated into.

Of these English is the most common,
and also the most widely understood,

Jan

--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

In article <10f4j2p$24v4e$1@dont-email.me>,
Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org> wrote:

(English is of course still an official EU language.)

Thank the Irish for that. If they choose instead to make Irish their
official EU language, the UK is screwed.

So would Ireland be!

It's also a language for Malta.

-- Richard
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

Le 13/11/2025 à 12:31, Peter Moylan a écrit :

On 13/11/25 23:11, Richard Tobin wrote:

(English is of course still an official EU language.)

Thank the Irish for that. If they choose instead to make Irish their
official EU language, the UK is screwed.

Oh, I don't know. Worse than that has happened on the Continent, and
we're still here.

--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On 13/11/2025 12:31, Peter Moylan wrote:

On 13/11/25 23:11, Richard Tobin wrote:

(English is of course still an official EU language.)

Thank the Irish for that. If they choose instead to make Irish their
official EU language, the UK is screwed.

Why? What do we care what language the EU uses?
--
Richard Heathfield
Email: rjh at cpax dot org dot uk
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
Sig line 4 vacant - apply within
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On 13 Nov 2025 11:44:22 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:

The other day, I read something from a Canadian man named "Spencer".
But his full name was Henry Spencer. In 1990, he wrote "awf", an implementation of "nroff -man" in awk!

Henry Spencer was a name I found cropping up frequently back in the heyday
of Usenet. He has contributed to a number of open-source projects, too.

With all this talk of CompSci people being associated with electrical/ electronic engineering versus maths departments, where do you think Henry Spencer was employed?

The Zoology department, University of Toronto.
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org> wrote:

On 13/11/25 23:11, Richard Tobin wrote:

(English is of course still an official EU language.)

Thank the Irish for that. If they choose instead to make Irish their
official EU language, the UK is screwed.

Come on, those Brits always overestimate their importance
in the scheme of things.
Their exit has not made much of a difference,

Jan
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

Henry Spencer was a name I found cropping up frequently back in the
heyday of Usenet.

He's also responsible for saving the early history of Usenet, through
utzoo's tape archive. Searching his archive (which I keep a local copy
of, indexed using notmuch) for "performant" finds about 30 examples from
1985 to 1991, the first few of which are:

Dec 1985 - "expert system which can be very performant", French poster
Aug 1986 - "most price-performant products", US poster
Nov 1986 - "[Ethernet] cards ... quite performant", French poster
Dec 1986 - "FTAM implementations ... performant or otherwise", US poster
Aug 1988 - "performant hardware", French poster
Dec 1988 - "seems to be quite performant", French poster
Mar 1989 - "performant software", US poster
Mar 1989 - "more performant packages", US poster

So there does seem to be some influence from French usage there...

archive.org's full text search also produces some results. Unfortunately
the vast majority are OCR errors for "performance" and similar words,
but there are a few earlier examples, such as "try to make
[planification methods] more performant" in a 1972 Belgian paper: https://archive.org/details/practicalapplica0000inte/page/342/mode/2up

And J. B. Sykes' "Technical Translator's Manual" from 1971 discusses it
in the context of borrowing between languages:

https://archive.org/details/technicaltransla0000unse/page/100/mode/2up

One such example is /performance/ from an old French /perfournir/,
which is now well established in modern French and has
characteristically gone on to make an adjective /performant/ which the English parent could never hope to produce.

--
Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org> <http://offog.org/>
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From Newsgroup: comp.misc

Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> wrote:

On 13/11/2025 12:31, Peter Moylan wrote:

On 13/11/25 23:11, Richard Tobin wrote:

(English is of course still an official EU language.)

Thank the Irish for that. If they choose instead to make Irish their official EU language, the UK is screwed.

Why? What do we care what language the EU uses?

And why would the EU care about Britain being, or not being a member?
They have been useless right from the start,
and they never were able to play the part
that they could and should have played.

Jan
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From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On 12/11/2025 08:55, Lawrence DOliveiro wrote:

The word “performant” seems to date to the early 19th century, and
then died out. However, according to ><https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/performant>:

Usage notes

The word performant has found a niche in the 21st century through
adoption in computing contexts, but remains otherwise practically
unknown in day-to-day communication, where more common
alternatives (such as high-performance, efficient or effective)
are typically adopted.

Would you agree that it is very much a niche usage?

The first time I heard that word was while working in India, early 2000s. I
assume it is an early example of Panglish (much of which would naturally
emerge from India given its population).
--
--
A PICKER OF UNCONSIDERED TRIFLES
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From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On 12/11/2025 12:25, richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk wrote:

In article <10f1i18$1am4s$1@dont-email.me>,
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

The word performant has found a niche in the 21st century through
adoption in computing contexts, but remains otherwise practically
unknown in day-to-day communication, where more common
alternatives (such as high-performance, efficient or effective)
are typically adopted.

Would you agree that it is very much a niche usage?

I spend all my life in computing contexts, and have never heard anyone
say the word. But then I had never heard anyone say "informatics"
until our department was renamed to that. Both sound like the sort of >made-up English found in EU technical documents.

-- Richard

Informatics is probably derived from the Franglais Informatique. It's
probably altered in meaning over the years, but used to denote a course of
study that combined hard CS with broader studies around business and
specific industries.
--
--
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From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On 13/11/2025 00:42, kludge@panix.com wrote:

Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOliveiro?= <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Thu, 13 Nov 2025 08:53:51 +1100, Peter Moylan wrote:

We in Electrical Engineering then proposed that CS be merged with the EE >>> department, and that's what happened. It wasn't that we felt that CS was >>> an engineering discipline. We just wanted to rescue the CS people from a >>> fate worse than death.

Funny how, in the early days (e.g. 1940s/50s/60s), many Comp Sci >>disciplines started within electrical/electronic engineering departments.

In the seventies and eighties there were two kinds of CS programs, the
ones that came out of EE departments and the ones that came out of math >departments. They were often dramatically different in their approach
and it wasn't until the ACM curriculum of the mid-1980s that this really >changed and some degree of uniformity appeared.

Of course, now we DO have CS departments that have sprung from the heads
of business programs. They are not very CS-like.
--scott

The funny thing about CS is you don't necessarily need to be great in either
of those disciplines to survive.
--
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A PICKER OF UNCONSIDERED TRIFLES
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From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On 13/11/2025 21:58, Adam Sampson wrote:

Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

Henry Spencer was a name I found cropping up frequently back in the
heyday of Usenet.

He's also responsible for saving the early history of Usenet, through
utzoo's tape archive. Searching his archive (which I keep a local copy
of, indexed using notmuch) for "performant" finds about 30 examples from
1985 to 1991, the first few of which are:

Dec 1985 - "expert system which can be very performant", French poster
Aug 1986 - "most price-performant products", US poster
Nov 1986 - "[Ethernet] cards ... quite performant", French poster
Dec 1986 - "FTAM implementations ... performant or otherwise", US poster
Aug 1988 - "performant hardware", French poster
Dec 1988 - "seems to be quite performant", French poster
Mar 1989 - "performant software", US poster
Mar 1989 - "more performant packages", US poster

So there does seem to be some influence from French usage there...

archive.org's full text search also produces some results. Unfortunately
the vast majority are OCR errors for "performance" and similar words,
but there are a few earlier examples, such as "try to make
[planification methods] more performant" in a 1972 Belgian paper: >https://archive.org/details/practicalapplica0000inte/page/342/mode/2up

And J. B. Sykes' "Technical Translator's Manual" from 1971 discusses it
in the context of borrowing between languages:

https://archive.org/details/technicaltransla0000unse/page/100/mode/2up

One such example is /performance/ from an old French /perfournir/,
which is now well established in modern French and has
characteristically gone on to make an adjective /performant/ which the
English parent could never hope to produce.

Well that murders my Panglish assumption (or does it)?
--
--
A PICKER OF UNCONSIDERED TRIFLES
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From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On 13/11/2025 21:19, nospam@de-ster.demon.nl wrote:

Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org> wrote:

On 13/11/25 23:11, Richard Tobin wrote:

(English is of course still an official EU language.)

Thank the Irish for that. If they choose instead to make Irish their
official EU language, the UK is screwed.

Come on, those Brits always overestimate their importance
in the scheme of things.
Their exit has not made much of a difference,

Jan

It has for the Brits...
--
--
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From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On Thu, 13 Nov 2025 22:34:49 -0000 (UTC), Jason H wrote:

... Panglish (much of which would naturally emerge from India given its population).

Now there’s a country that does a lot of software devil-opment ...
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From Newsgroup: comp.misc

On Wed, 12 Nov 2025 19:38:45 -0500 (EST), Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:

In article <y2awm3vgzfr.fsf@offog.org>, Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org> wrote: >>I always push back against it when I see my students using it -- not >>because the word doesn't exist, but because it's meaningless unless you

say what types of performance you care about. Does a "performant"
network application mean high bandwidth, low latency, low CPU load, low >>energy usage, or what?

If your computer is not performant, maybe you need a CPU with higher >mippage, or maybe you need more core, or maybe you need more baud.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

I just came across the word in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, VOL. SE-11, No. 1, January 1985 in an article entitled, The Eden System: A Technical Review.

"Our objective for Eden 1.0 was a prototype that we could construct fairly quickly and that would be sufficiently performant to allow us to conduct experiments using it."

Written in 1985, by a bunch of Americans. So, there's another datapoint for everyone.

--
Sent from my Personal DECstation 5000/25
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