Bang Pipe Slash

I know I am a geek when I google this sort of stuff and find it interesting and educational. I use the term Pipe all the time for the | character, it is a fundamental character in PowerShell, you can’t get far without it. I learned it Don Jones and Jeffery Snover from watching the Microsoft Virtual Academy videos back when I was first getting certified. They used it, they even explained it in the entry level courses and I guess it is clear that it is called a Pipe because it looks like one?

For me drowning in imposter syndrome I never questioned why it was called a Pipe, I assumed that they covered this in CS undergraduate course which I didn’t take and now everyone else knows the secrete real names for tilde and I am just winging it by the seat of my pants trying to catch up. Ah but now I’m full of confidence and I feel no shame in saying that it was very recently that I learned that an exclamation mark was called a Bang. Why a bang, at first I just accepted it as a wonder of the elders, but today I Googled it and found this veritable Tour de Web of some alternate names where geek culture mixes with practically to create the nick names that we take for granted today. That led me to here

Let us start with the Bang !, as found in jargon file

I read on StackOverflow that the nicknames could have come from the early programming days where they needed to tell each other what to type and bang is much faster to say that exclamation mark. As was said in the SO thread, nicknames don’t need to be sensible they just need to be effective.

Written on October 1, 2018
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