I’m sorry, I’m just bewildered. And quite sympathetic. Perhaps you’ll see what I see in Brian McCallister’s explanation of containers in webapps. He’s clearly speaking to Java developers. But using Ruby and YAML to describe his thoughts!

We don’t want to call Ruby a scripting language, right? A phrase laden with futility. And agile language is just a peppier replacement. For once, friends, I beg of you: take me seriously.

Coderspeak is the word you want. From Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby:

My conscience won’t let me call Ruby a computer language. That would imply that the language works primarily on the computer’s terms. That the language is designed to accomodate the computer, first and foremost. That therefore, we, the coders, are foreigners, seeking citizenship in the computer’s locale. It’s the computer’s language and we are translators for the world.

But what do you call the language when your brain begins to think in that language? When you start to use the language’s own words and colloquialisms to express yourself. Say, the computer can’t do that. How can it be the computer’s language? It is ours, we speak it natively!

We can no longer truthfully call it a computer language. It is coderspeak. It is the language of our thoughts.

I truly hate to quote myself. I feel bad about it already. It’s just. This quote is so lucid, it’s like someone else said it. How’s that?