See also: codeface

English

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Etymology

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Blend of code +‎ coalface.

Noun

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code face (plural code faces)

  1. (computing, informal) The place where programmers develop source code (as opposed to conceptually distant areas such as design and marketing).
    • 1992, Patrick A V Hall, Software reuse and reverse engineering in practice:
      [] hype merchants of the computing world are up and running off towards the horizon before the IS workers toiling away at the code face are even crawling.
    • 1992, Derek Partridge, Engineering artificial intelligence software:
      Why is it that, everywhere we look in the software world from academics, for whom computation is an abstract notion way above the trivializing clutter of actual computers, to hard-core systems designers and programmers, people actually working at the code face (as it were), we encounter this urge to apologize for the current techniques and to seek improvement?
    • 1999, Barb Knox, “Y2K Optimism: Unjustified in survey”, in comp.software.year-2000 (Usenet):
      This was a CIO Magazine poll of senior managers, not a poll of programmers at the codeface. Programmers will get enough deserved blame in the Y2k aftermath; please don't incite undeserved blame.
    • 2003, Robert L Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering:
      Documentation is at least one conceptual step away from the code-face, out of date the moment it's written, and difficult to write []
    • 2007, Pete Goodliffe, Code craft: the practice of writing excellent code:
      Code craft starts at the codeface; it's where we love to be. We programmers are never happier than when immersed in an editor, bashing out line after line of perfectly formed and well-executed source code.

Alternative forms

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