Easy:

The term that means “I’m going to let another developer take this one.

Electronic Data Interchange (E.D.I.):

1. Utopian nightmare for those confused by order-taking.
2. A way of turning a simple profit into a complicated expense.

Elegant Design:

Having avoided all attempts at formal design to the end that it runs and is maintainable.

Emulator:

1. Rich Little as an IDE.
2. Video-game version of your target platform without the “high scores” page.

Entity Framework^® (EF):

1. An ORM for Windows programmers who can’t spell.
2. Microsoft’s idea of simplifying object-relational mapping by demanding that the developer become expert in all areas of data acquisition, persistence handling, queries and query parsing, relational mapping, and transaction management.
3. The cunning Microsoft approach to product development that lays the majority of product development on the buyer, thereby allowing the seller to blame the buyer for any failures.
4. Redmond’s proof that writing object-relational mapping layers is really hard. It is. Wah!
5. Microsoft’s secret plan to force its customer-base to use: Ideablade/Devforce; DevExpress XPO; LLBLGen; NHibernate; etc.; etc.; etc…

Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD):

1. A place where Entities go to meet.
2. Representing foreign key constraints between tables on a two-dimensional diagram by drawing boxes with column names and lines between them.
3. Often mistaken for The Code of Federal Regulations, only less concise.

Encrypt:

1. To bury. Entomb.
2. Data Cuisinart^© that has the miraculous ability to reverse the process and make eggs out of omelets.
3. To hackers in Jr. High computer science class, a challenge.
4. To scramble readable data into such intractable gibberish as to be mistaken for storing Perl code where data should be.

“I have encrypted Maya Angelou’s poetry,” cried the excited cryptographer.
“How can you tell?” asked the literary critic.

Engineer:

1. Someone trained in the methods of defeating nature with artifice.
2. A skilled follower of pre-laid paths, over leveled roads, along known routes, within formal schedules, using standard tools and well-studied resources.
3. The once-respectable person who drove the train.

The Engineer
I’m not allowed to run the train
The whistle I can’t blow.
I’m not the one who designates
How far the train will go.
I’m not allowed to blow off steam,
Nor even clang the bell;
But let the damn thing jump the track
And see who catches hell. (anon)

(see: Software Engineer)

Engineering:

1. The once-respectable profession of driving the train.
2. The academic discipline of over-complicating the trivial.
3. The application of physics and the scientific method in materials, electricity and magnetism, infrastructure, or aerodynamics, process, and psychology in a way never ever possible in software or application development.

Environment:

1. The entire set of conditions established by intent or ignorance, through control or chaos, in which an element interacts.
2. A place that is not just hostile, but deadly — in all cases, at all times, for all reasons — toward the architect’s intended goals.
3. The combination of all factors and properties (controllable and uncontrollable) in which a design is conceived and in which an application is developed.

The debate has raged for centuries: whether it is Nature (the innate) or Nurture (the environment) that determines what a man will be. This debate is meaningless unless it is well understood that it will surely be the Environment that kills him.

Error:

Ongoing evidence that programming languages and users, when combined, are far smarter than you.

Entity:

1. A being.
2. A being reduced to code and CRUD.
3. Sometimes called a POCO, but who can’t whistle.

ERP:

1. Sound it out. (Yep. That’s how it makes all of us feel.)
2. Enterprise Resource Planning application to automate and support key business activities. 
3. A complex array of business automation utilities, backed on a comprehensive business data model, running on a powerful business engine; capable of previously-impossible creativity or even more devastating destruction, depending on implementation.

Since no two businesses do the same thing in the same way, a neat way of hand-waving to accomplish what no business schools have ever done, to formalize what no single business model can cover.

Esoteric:

1. So important you haven’t heard about it.
2. Too cranial to discuss here.
3. An unpublished disaster from a previous client that will be reused here just to make sure it was the idea that was bad.

Estimate:

1. Whatever promise the project manager gave to the client to get the work.
2. An utterly unreliable guess at how long it might take – that the project manager will convey to the customer as a fixed bid.
3. A lie, told in bad faith to a junior executive who cannot interpret it; and who will presume it’s a lie and cut in half the time or cost before passing it up to a superior.
4. A game in software development that ensures the developer can never win.

Event:

1. Programming’s equivalent of Newton’s Third Law of Mechanics.
2. It’s up to the programmer to decide what is equal and what is opposite.
3. Only compiler designers really know what an event is. Just be happy if you can get your program to respond to you.

Exception Handling:

The art of knowing when the user will leave the path of righteousness without knowing what to do about it when they do.

Executable:

Any program that has run, at least once, without crashing or triggering a war.

Execution:

The just and appropriate sentence for anyone who has ever written an executable.

Expandable:

Over-engineered with capacity that will never be used.

Extensible:

Over-engineered with features that will never be used.

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