Its truly amazing to me how many places come up with their own version of a language in day to day business. This is one of the extreme version, but I guess when you have to deal with horrible conditions for normal communication you make do.
I worked at place that used to have teletypes between locations and paid per letter. They developed a set of abbreviations that survived well into the e-mail era[1]. Every place at least has a lingo to explain specific concepts and procedures in the business.
This is one reason I am very interested in DSLs, dialects in languages like Red and REBOL, and speech acts in agent literature. It seems like a more natural fit with business to developer communication than API calls.
1) I wrote a perl program to translate at one point in some frustration.
I worked at place that used to have teletypes between locations and paid per letter. They developed a set of abbreviations that survived well into the e-mail era[1]. Every place at least has a lingo to explain specific concepts and procedures in the business.
This is one reason I am very interested in DSLs, dialects in languages like Red and REBOL, and speech acts in agent literature. It seems like a more natural fit with business to developer communication than API calls.
1) I wrote a perl program to translate at one point in some frustration.