There are two very similar words, deprecate and depreciate. They are not the same word.
Deprecation is what has happened to a bit of an API that you’re not supposed to use any more. It means, in the technical community, that something is old or broken or has been replaced by a better alternative but still exists for backward coding compatibility, and you should think about not using it because it might go away in the future. (There’s also self-deprecating humour, to take an example of the different meaning of the word, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about.)
Depreciation is what happens to cars and houses and things when they go down in price after you’ve bought them. Economists no doubt have a technical meaning for it, but think of it this way: remember when you bought that beautiful new PowerBook or Mac G5 for about two grand, and ten seconds after you bought it it was worth seventeen hundred quid, and now you couldn’t sell it for mor than about fourteen hundred? That’s depreciation; an item’s price dropping over time just because it’s getting older.
Bits of specs or APIs or programs do not depreciate, in general. The easy way to remember this is as follows:
If you are talking about code, you almost certainly mean to say deprecate or deprecated. If you are talking about prices, you almost certainly mean to say depreciate or depreciation or depreciated.
People getting this wrong annoys me out of all proportion to the (frankly pretty tiny) magnitude of their error.
And this is Deprecate, written , and concerning Uncategorized
Comments
Paul
sil
"Write someone" rather than "write to someone" is a pretty standard Americanism, and I'm not going to get into whether American English is "wrong" or not. :-) You score a point for actually knowing the difference between the two, though; I get the impression that a fair few people don't even know that there are two different words...
john
Sounds like a mute point to me.
sil
Arf, arf, arf. Thanks, John. :)
Aquarion
Moot. as in "And bailey"
sil
Nun of you lot are funny, you know. :)
Matthew Revell
The real problem comes when you confuse deprecate with defecate.
Of course, confusing self-deprecate with the self-depreciate, could only ever be right when applied to prostitutes and other types of consultants :)
mbstevens
“....a bit of an API that you?re not supposed to use any more….”
Actually, it’s also used with bits of a language you’re not supposed to use anymore. I often see it used in writing about C, Python, and Perl.
mbstevens
“....a bit of an API that you?re not supposed to use any more….”
Actually, it’s also used with bits of a language you’re not supposed to use anymore. I often see it used in writing about C, Python, and Perl.
Randy
Hopefuly we are selfappreciating, and not selfdepreciating. I guess we are selfdeprecating in the dead tissue of our fingernails and hair continuing to grow longer. And we are all selfdefecating, because I don’t know we could hire to do such a job. And what type of tool would they use? Ugh.
I used to get this wrong all of the time. I didn't mean to, I just couldn't pronounce deprecate properly. I knew I didn't mean that the old API code was worth less. I think I've got it write now. :)
btw, something that annoys me out of all proportion; "write the developer" instead of "write to". Arrrgh.