On my way into work this morning I was thinking how, I cannot ever recall seeing "deprecated" spelt correctly on CPAN. Always depreciation and deprecation are confused. Then as the wind rushed pass my cycling helmet, I thought perhaps the linguistically inaccurate have a point - obsolete open source code may well have a negative value. Then whilst wobbly waiting for the traffic lights to change from from red, I thought "You are being confused as well." CPAN code is never valueless, simply free. And open source code in general may not be free - simply free of restrictions and hindrances to use. And even the technical meaning of "depreciation", probably does not permit the account value of an asset to proceed from zero to negative.

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Re: "Deprecation" versus "Depreciation"
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Jul 02, 2010 at 16:34 UTC

    Given this musing + The Coding Itch, I have to insist, as Your Mother, that you only ride your motorcycle sober.

    But seriously. Hackers can't spell: "referer" anyone? They don't feel tied to convention: "chron" (or "kron" at least) please! And "deprecated" means pretty much the right thing here: "this usage is frowned upon; after sufficient frowning, I'll be breaking it on you because you chose to do something stupid, aka, something I deprecate."

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      Depreciation could be thought of as a property of deprecation. The value of my sinclair C5 depreciated due to its deprecation. It should be noted that the property may also be a negative value, this is stored as appreciation. where in the above example as a result of the historic significance of the C5 its deprecation has lead to an appreciation of both value and entusiasts. Don Coyote
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