I guess I’m firmly in old man territory now but every time I read or hear the usage of “compute” to describe computer capability I just get a little triggered. I think it’s because I remember it being used back in the 80s and then never for 3 decades and now it’s being used again like it never went away.
Or maybe I’m just having a Mandela effect moment and everyone will tell me they’ve been using it constantly for years. Bullshit.
As for why it annoys me, I have no idea. I guess this is how conservatives are made.
Compute was originally a perfectly cromulent word, it refers to computing power as a continuous variable rather than discrete which made sense when we moved to cloud computing. Before cloud, we talked about having individual machines and deploying new, named machines. The change in paradigm was that compute was now just a dial you could turn by hand or autoscale via APIs.
Of course, people started misusing the term in an attempt to sound cooler and more modern but the original meaning was distinct and necessary.
I’ve never heard the word used in this manner. It’s ridiculous and immediately irritating. I’ve heard it used, “that does not compute”, meaning “that”, whatever it is, does not make any logical sense.
I’ve seen it reasonably often lately, and, well, it does jar the ears, because it’s a usage I wasn’t used to. I wouldn’t say it annoys me; it’ll just take me a minute to get used to it.
Count me with those who have never heard this. Not saying it doesn’t happen, I probably just deal with more tech literate people. It sounds like either nonsense (how much go car have?) or meme talk. Which I guess is a different form of nonsense but at least intentional.
As a data scientist, my wife works with cloud computing, so perhaps that’s where I’ve been hearing it mostly, but I’m reasonably sure I’ve heard and seen it elsewhere, too. And it’s not “illiterate” talk. It’s industry jargon.
Makes sense though since I talk to people about tech stuff but not industry professionals about cloud computing. I had the vibe that this was something the rank and file were saying to one another.
In what way do you think it does not obey the rules of grammar? If it’s a noun, it can be used in any syntactic structure that expects a noun.
“Compute” as a noun has a centuries-old history in English. In the 15th and 16th centuries it was used as a synonym for “computer”, and starting from the 16th century it’s been used as a synonym for “computation”, which is pretty close to the usage we’ve been discussing here.
