PURVEYOR OF FINE WORDS

June 17 2005

Call it anything but Ajax

Dear Jesse James Garrett: while we are grateful for your endorsement (and I for your inbound links) — which gave this technology a marketable term and created a near cataclysmic tipping point — could you have picked a more neutral, irritating, or patent-infringing acronym? Ajax is a staple household cleaner, a pillar of domestic maintenance, not a programming methodology. Now, CORBA is a stunning, authoritative acronym that connotes technology with some serious cojones (and lets ignore the fact that many consider it a stunning failure). My favorite, though, is NORML: a beautifully ironic acronym that rivals the genius of Velcro by forcing the anti-dope crowd refer to the people they hate as “normal.” Sublime.

I comment about this because the Gmail ads are now spamming my programming emails with the following ad:

Ajax/Javascript @ A9.com - join.a9.com - Ajax and Javascript software gurus! Help us build our next big thing.

The link leads to a boringly generic jobs page, but the consequences are potentially dire. When is the first “Ajax Developer” title going to appear on business cards? How long will it be before clueless tech managers attempt to appear knowledgeable by claiming that their products use bleeding-edge Comet technology?