Snippet #521

One thing I'm noticing in my experiments with Rails 3 is that the Rails team have their own unique definition of what "deprecated" means which is different from the standard definition universally shared by everyone else: in Rails lingo, "deprecated" means "removed, ripped out, extirpated, as of right now, without advance notice, usually without alternatives listed in the documentation, and without any justification or explanation included in the corresponding commit message". If they want to remove functionality that's fine, and if they want to do it without any supporting explanation that's fine too, but I'd just appreciate it if they just used some descriptive terminology (like "removed") rather than misusing "deprecated". I fear that less experienced developers will end up imitating this style and the value of the term will end up getting eroded to the point where it becomes a mere synonym of "removed".