[kowlo]

> Its a commonly understood term AFAIK

I agree - it's what made me raise an eyebrow... However, based on their comment above, the lead author of Nbdev believes to have coined the term.

My opinion is that due diligence and attribution are important. If I believed I'd coined a new term, I'd check first. Mistakes are easy to make, but when highlighted, perhaps corrections are more appropriate than negotiating with the person highlighting them:

From the lead author (jph00): ... If someone else can think of a better term that's never been used before, then I'll happily use that instead.

[idf00]

Why are people nitpicking about this? So the term/phrase he came up with was so descriptive that other people had also thought of the same term previously. He didn't steal anyones research on the topic, or steal code for the project, or deny credit to a developer working on a project. It's 2 simple words that are extremely common in the english language. Of course lots of people have happened to put them together before.

This is my second time on hacker news, and I don't think I will be back. Why not offer to help the project, or show support? Why try to find something to fight about? It's just demoralizing to see the lack of kindness from people.

[kortilla]

People that “coin terms” that don’t spend the two seconds required to Google it and then spread around statements like “I coined it” are self-aggrandizing.

It’s worth calling them out and discouraging this behavior because it leads to missing entire fields of previous work for both the author and people who build on the work.

[idf00]

If you knew him at all or had bothered to spend the time to look at his work and projects in any level of depth, you would know he is not a self-aggrandizing person.

And if the arguement is that this is a gateway action that leads to other bad things, that's not an arguement I put any stock in. It's used a lot in many places and many discussions, but just focus calling out the bad. It isn't his responsibility to ensure that some person building off his work at some point in the future does the appropriate level of research appropriate for their project. Assuming that an action is bad because you think someday down the road it might lead someone else to do something and that that something will be a bad thing is just ridiculous.

[kortilla]

> you would know he is not a self-aggrandizing person.

But he is, he just claimed he coined “exploratory programming” FFS. It takes a shocking lack of hubris to announce that you are on the cutting edge of a field where you get to coin terms without doing the trivial amount of searching to verify it first.

[kowlo]

This is going off-topic. I highlighted something factual - this is not personal.

Whether they choose to update the materials and reference existing work is up to them.

[bavell]

Thank you. It just comes off very elitist and distasteful, not something you like to see in people doing big things. We want to look up to these people, not cringe when they "coin" a common phrase and dig their heels in when confronted.