Glossary
Table of contents
Edit this pageThis article contains a list of commonly-used terms on the Day of Code, for reference.
Code languages
HTML
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a way of providing structure to content.
Ruby
We have chosen to use Ruby because it is an elegant language. You’ll know the seminal work on writing, Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style”. William Strunk, Jr. would be delighted with Ruby:
Omit needless words.
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, 1918
As computing power has increased over the last few decades, we can have programming languages optimised for humans, not computers. Computers are powerful enough nowadays to allow Ruby methods to be written in clear English, which take longer to process than some terse machine code, but makes for a far more enjoyable coding experience, because Ruby is readable. Book.all, for example, means “get all the books”.
Code libraries
Jekyll
Jekyll is a static site generator. The tutorial website you’re current reading is made using Jekyll, and so is the website that this tutorial builds. Read more about it at Jekyllrb.com.
Software
Command prompt
Windows-specific command line interface (CLI) software. Also referred to as the “command line”.
Terminal
Mac-specific command line interface (CLI) software, in which you can type commands directly to Unix, the underlying operating system of OS X. Also referred to as the “command line”.
Code organisation terms
Repositories
Also referred to as “repos”, you can think of repositories as project folders, often versioned with a tool called Git. Github is a repository hosting service.